Double your disk space??

  • Thread starter Thread starter The little lost angel
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The little lost angel

Nobody here seems to have picked this up. I know it's from the
Inquirer but sounds interesting *if* it really almost doubles the
amount of space.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14597

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The said:
Nobody here seems to have picked this up. I know it's from the
Inquirer but sounds interesting *if* it really almost doubles the
amount of space.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14597
Click to expand...


Was posted here 2 threads ago, according to my NNTP server.

Something completely absurd as that should be setting off red flags. I
think the general consensus is that the process described is a way to
corrupt your partition table in a way that it appears that you've
doubled your space.

This kind of reminds me of those cell phone "antenna booster" stickers.
If it really worked, don't you think the *manufacturer* would be doing
it? (Except in this case, the results are disastrous)


-WD
 
Will Dormann said:
Was posted here 2 threads ago, according to my NNTP server.

Something completely absurd as that should be setting off red flags. I
think the general consensus is that the process described is a way to
corrupt your partition table in a way that it appears that you've
doubled your space.

This kind of reminds me of those cell phone "antenna booster" stickers.
If it really worked, don't you think the *manufacturer* would be doing
it? (Except in this case, the results are disastrous)


-WD
Click to expand...

How can the result be disastrous..
The general view is that it's corrupting your partition table and it's
giving the false impression
If that's the case then there will be no harm done to the disk and a simple
low level format will fix it
 
rstlne said:
How can the result be disastrous..
The general view is that it's corrupting your partition table and it's
giving the false impression
If that's the case then there will be no harm done to the disk and a simple
low level format will fix it
Click to expand...


Sure, no physical harm is done. But your data is at risk. I consider
losing my data a disaster.

Give it a shot and see what happens when you start to fill up the drive.


-WD
 
Something completely absurd as that should be setting off red flags. I
think the general consensus is that the process described is a way to
corrupt your partition table in a way that it appears that you've
doubled your space.
Click to expand...

Intuitively, red flags popped up. But a friend pointed me to a
discussion on some forum. Apparently at least one person tried it and
believes it really does work after dumping a few files in the new
partition but refused to bother with further verification.
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If you need basic to med complexity webpages at affordable rates, email me :)
Standard HTML, SHTML, MySQL + PHP or ASP, Javascript.
If you really want, FrontPage & DreamWeaver too.
But keep in mind you pay extra bandwidth for their bloated code
 
The said:
Intuitively, red flags popped up. But a friend pointed me to a
discussion on some forum. Apparently at least one person tried it and
believes it really does work after dumping a few files in the new
partition but refused to bother with further verification.
Click to expand...


And the chances that I trust one person in a forum somewhere? :)

Let's say that I have a drive that stores 80GB, and I find out a new
whizz-bang way to make it store more than 80GB. Wouldn't a logical
step to test out that theory be to put more than 80GB on the drive?


-WD
 
The little lost angel said:
Nobody here seems to have picked this up. I know it's from the
Inquirer but sounds interesting *if* it really almost doubles the
amount of space.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14597
Click to expand...


This "hidden partition" has been discussed a lot over the
years in alt.sys.pc-clone.dell (the Dell newsgroup). It
contains the as-delivered form of the OS which one can use
to re-load if something screws up badly early in the PC's
usage history. (Search on "ZZTop" at Groups.Google for
archived discussions.) The problem with using it is that
everything done - the files created, software installed, the
personal settings - are all lost and have to be re-created and
re-installed. Eventually, though, as the hard drive fills up,
this area at the end of the hard drive gets overwritten and
is lost. So at least for Dell machines, the ZZTop "partition"
doesn't take up any space as it gets used for storage later
on anyway. And since it essentially just contains the OS
and maybe some manafacturer screen images, it takes
up far less room than half the hard drive.

*TimDaniels*
 
Dell hasn't done that in years. Current Dell's only come with a diagnostic
partition that allows you to run diags at boot (CTRL+ALT+D at the Dell
logo).

The partition is a whopping 32mb.

Yes, megabytes.

Partitionmagic can delete it or even assign it a drive letter.

Who hoo -- room for 6 MP3s.

Tom
 
Sure, no physical harm is done. But your data is at risk. I consider
losing my data a disaster.

Give it a shot and see what happens when you start to fill up the drive.


-WD
Click to expand...

Yea.. I MIGHT do it tonight.. The data thing is an issue as my backup drives
arent fast enough for me to install a "NT" Bootable OS and my 2 big drives
are both in their own boxes.. I migh ttry it tonight tho just for kicks..
 
Tom Scales said:
Dell hasn't done that in years.
Click to expand...

Too bad. Running zzTop saved my butt from some
buggy Earthlink software in the early months of my PC's
life.

*TimDaniels*
 
Timothy said:
Too bad. Running zzTop saved my butt from some
buggy Earthlink software in the early months of my PC's
life.
Click to expand...


Aren't recovery CDs/DVDs common these days? (to accomplish the same
functionality)


-WD
 
Previously The little lost angel said:
Nobody here seems to have picked this up. I know it's from the
Inquirer but sounds interesting *if* it really almost doubles the
amount of space.
Click to expand...
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14597
Click to expand...

This is wrong. Most likely overlapping partitions, i.e. you see more
space but cannot use it. In the worst case any writes to the new space
will corrupt the whole disk.

There is just no way to get that much additional space. HDDs have
maybe 1% or so additional space to what is directly available
(exception: sometimes small disks are turned into smaller ones, to
fullfill a large order.).

Arno
 
Dell doesn't ship recovery CDs. They ship REAL OS/Application CDs. One of
the reasons I prefer Dell.

Tom
 
Yes it can work, normally you can AT LEAST DOUBLE THE SIZE in
just 3 weeks! For more details see: http://www.maximizer-rx.com/
Click to expand...

Darn, for a moment I thought somebody has verified first hand the
Inquirer article. But it looks like somebody must have misread my
previous thread as dick instead of disk.... :PppPPpp

--
L.Angel: I'm looking for web design work.
If you need basic to med complexity webpages at affordable rates, email me :)
Standard HTML, SHTML, MySQL + PHP or ASP, Javascript.
If you really want, FrontPage & DreamWeaver too.
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And the chances that I trust one person in a forum somewhere? :)
Click to expand...

Me neither but so far it's the only person I know about who has
actually tried it apart from the Inq's report submitter.
Let's say that I have a drive that stores 80GB, and I find out a new
whizz-bang way to make it store more than 80GB. Wouldn't a logical
step to test out that theory be to put more than 80GB on the drive?
Click to expand...

Yup, the person did do that, put more than the original capacity onto
the drives and sorta verified them. But his verification consist of
testing out whether some of the files could be opened, rather than
taking the suggestion of using a monolithic file and doing a checksum
on the data to see if everything actually remains uncorrupted.

--
L.Angel: I'm looking for web design work.
If you need basic to med complexity webpages at affordable rates, email me :)
Standard HTML, SHTML, MySQL + PHP or ASP, Javascript.
If you really want, FrontPage & DreamWeaver too.
But keep in mind you pay extra bandwidth for their bloated code
 
re-installed. Eventually, though, as the hard drive fills up,
this area at the end of the hard drive gets overwritten and
is lost. So at least for Dell machines, the ZZTop "partition"
doesn't take up any space as it gets used for storage later
on anyway. And since it essentially just contains the OS
and maybe some manafacturer screen images, it takes
up far less room than half the hard drive.
Click to expand...

I know this has been done, my own laptop has the same functionality.
But the thing is, if there is really another 250GB worth of space on a
250GB drive, why aren't the HDD manufacturers selling these to
non-Dell/(or whatever bigname vendor) end users as say 400GB or 500GB
drives? I'm pretty sure the profit margins would be a lot prettier.

I can understand if a 200GB drive had another 10% hidden, but a full
100%? :P

--
L.Angel: I'm looking for web design work.
If you need basic to med complexity webpages at affordable rates, email me :)
Standard HTML, SHTML, MySQL + PHP or ASP, Javascript.
If you really want, FrontPage & DreamWeaver too.
But keep in mind you pay extra bandwidth for their bloated code
 
The little lost angel said:
Darn, for a moment I thought somebody has verified first hand the
Inquirer article. But it looks like somebody must have misread my
previous thread as dick instead of disk.... :PppPPpp
Click to expand...


C'mon, get it *straight*! "Hitachi to unveil 400GB hard dick".

*TimDaniels*
 
The said:
Me neither but so far it's the only person I know about who has
actually tried it apart from the Inq's report submitter.


Yup, the person did do that, put more than the original capacity onto
the drives and sorta verified them. But his verification consist of
testing out whether some of the files could be opened, rather than
taking the suggestion of using a monolithic file and doing a checksum
on the data to see if everything actually remains uncorrupted.
Click to expand...

Remember the Chang Modification? Doubled the clock speed on any machine?
A lot of journalists bought into it. Turns out that all it did was cut the
speed of the realtime clock in half so benchmarks falsely reported a higher
speed.

Well this smells of Chang.
 
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