Free extra space? check this!!!

[Steve]

Might I suggest, David, that, in your first post, you put an instruction to read the entire thread before trying it? Just to make sure that no one goes and kills their home PC.

Nice work, those of you who went out and tried this (Kez, Josh, etc.). Made an interesting read.

A good suggestion Eldren! Don't want people jumping the gun.

This thread has had nealry 6000 views - it'll make us famous, lol.

[Ravens Nest]

Or infamous

[joshwa]

Excellent Josh those are the kind of figures we need.

The question is why is it doing that? Is it purely down to a software bug in GDisk or is it something more than that?

I think the ghost backup feature is probably creating a temporary partition in order to use it to backup the C: partition (I don't think Ghost normally lets you backup a partition to the same drive, so therefore by creating what looks like a partition, it can backup to the same drive, without necessarily telling you about it). By not letting ghost get on and do it's thing, it's leaving the temporary partition in place - fooling windows into thinking there's a real partition there.

[blockers]

What does LBA stand for?

As currently i am low level formatting a 60gb maxtor IDE hard drive. It says that there is "Maximum LBA - 12010320"

Its probably nothing, but just as its about double the size of the actual hard drive i was wondering if it had any revalence to extra hard drive space?

Will

[Steve]

Josh I've got to disagree with you, as the partitioning program is being used to create a 10MB virtual partition on the existing one. Furthermore, it is GDisk, a partitioning utility, rather than ghost itself doing the "magic" and I can't see why it would intentionally do such a thing.

Blockers - LBA is just a way of acessing and addressing a drive - most drives use LBA, don't worry about it.

[blockers]

ah - ty kez

[Howard]

Well that made an excellent half an hour's reading

Can one of you guys list in a nut shell what I will need if I'm to try it? (A PC, which copy of Ghost, etc)?

I've got an old 2.8GB Maxtor Diamondmax 2880 here to try it with, and loads of other 2-3 GB drives and the old 233MHz Guinea-pig PC.
Does it need Windows NT of some sort though?

Edit:

Although this model of the Diamondmax 2880 is 2.8GB, from the Maxtor site:

Maximum Capacity of 11.5 GB

So I might be able to get another 8 or so GB out of it

[Steve]

Well, the general concensus is that it'll nacker the partitions as they overlap (but this varies depending on the disk.)

Anyway, you'll need an OS on the disk in question, and norton ghost, build 775. You'll also need a DOS bootable floppy with 350kb free to fit Gdisk.exe onto it if you want to follow my instructions for doing it with just one drive (seen earlier in this thread.)

I presume I don't need to stress that there shouldn't be any valuable data on the drive, and that nobody here can be responsible for any fudgeups!

Still... it's fun to play, lol.

[Howard]

IT's an old 2.8GB drive, I don't really care what happens to it. Lol.

[PMM]

I don't see how it can work ?

to increase the size of the disk would mean extending how far out the read heads go.

If thats the logical case you would be moving track 0 and your MBR(Master Boot record) into an area of unknown accracy.

you then open the drive up to all sorts of errors one bit showing as a 1 instead of a 0 can disable your drive or make it act as something different
to what it is.

[joshwa]

I have a 1.6gb hard drive with a window - and i watched it do a full scan - there is literally no extra space that the head could go to get the extra space... i'll show you a pic...



P = Head parked (where it is now)
1 = Where the head starts reading data from
2 = Where the head stops reading data, when doing a full scan

[Howard]

So do you need to leave the original and the "expanded" partition seperate?
Methinks it's something to do with Ghost screwing up the partition tables and making the computer think there are two. But then again, people hvae tested this by filling them with data

After all, why would a hard drive manufacturer want to spend money manufacturing one drive, say, 200GB, and selling it as a 200Gb drive for the intended price, then spend the same amount manufacturing a 200GB drive, disabling 80, selling it cheaper as a 120GB drive, and thus losing money?
Odd... Hopefully this will all pan out into some interesting reading

[joshwa]

they normally remove the read head(s) in order to make the different sizes eg:

3x 80gb platters (40gb on each side of platter) with 6 heads = 240/250gb drives
with 5 heads = 200gb, 4 heads = 160gb, 3 heads = 120gb, 2 heads = 80gb, 1 head = 40gb.

[Swafe]

howard? how about trying it to get some more space, then doing the full scan again, and see what data it reads?

if it reads far out - works
if it reads same space - dont work

[Howard]

You mean Josh

[Steve]

People (me included) have tested by filling the drives and found it breaks things.

The issue I personally was looking at was whether the manufacturers were making drives will all read/write heads installed and then "hiding them" using firmware. I thought perhaps ghost was interpreting data differently to how it should, and finding the extra space.

However, this seems not to be the case. As for losing money - I doubt they lose money selling a 200 as a 120.