Double your disk space??

[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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[Will Dormann]

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

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

 

[rstlne]

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

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

 

[Will Dormann]

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

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

 

[The little lost angel]

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.

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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[Will Dormann]

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.

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

 

[Timothy Daniels]

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

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*

 

[Tom Scales]

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

 

[Joep]

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/

 

[rstlne]

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

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..

 

[Timothy Daniels]

Dell hasn't done that in years.

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

*TimDaniels*

 

[Will Dormann]

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

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


-WD

 

[Arno Wagner]

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

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

 

[Arno Wagner]

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/

Yes, that must be it! ;-)==)

Good one!
Arno

 

[Tom Scales]

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

Tom

 

[The little lost angel]

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/

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.... ppPPpp

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[The little lost angel]

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

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?

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

 

[The little lost angel]

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.

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%?

--
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

 

[Timothy Daniels]

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.... ppPPpp

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

*TimDaniels*

 

[J. Clarke]

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.

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.