Something just doesn't seem right about that at all. Though I'm still tempted to try it. First I'm curious how the hell they did it on a laptop also.
My guess is it's just messing up the Fat tables and that's it. Using some error in it. My guess is longterm use will lead to data loss.
Also do this little trick then fill up both partitions and see what kind of nightmare it causes. You can fool an OS but you can't fool track/sector size.
Also do this little trick then fill up both partitions and see what kind of nightmare it causes. You can fool an OS but you can't fool track/sector size.
What is happening is that Norton Ghost creates a virtual partition on the drive, and the data for that virtual partition resides on one of the existing partitions. So as more data is added on the virtual partition, a file on the normal drive partition expands as well.
It's kind of like a disk image which is being mounted to a drive letter. All the data for it is still on the primary partition.
Hopefully that's clear enough to explain what is happening here. The extra virtual partition basically is defined as the amount of freespace on the partition to which the that virtual partition file actually resides.
In short: No miracle space here, don't bother the hard drives manufactures. Just using a feature in ghost in a weird way, but with no real benifits other than being able to boot a disk image without reszing all the partitions on your drive.
That's pretty much what I figured was happening, though I haven't played with Ghost enough beyond normal standard use to figure out what it was doing.
It'd be interesting to see how many people completely messed up their system doing this. Since the only way to fix it is to either copy everything off to another drive and reformat the first.
citrixmeta
Montreal, Quebec Icrontian
Comments
My guess is it's just messing up the Fat tables and that's it. Using some error in it. My guess is longterm use will lead to data loss.
Also do this little trick then fill up both partitions and see what kind of nightmare it causes. You can fool an OS but you can't fool track/sector size.
Same thing i was thinking.
Let us know how it goes Citrix
What is happening is that Norton Ghost creates a virtual partition on the drive, and the data for that virtual partition resides on one of the existing partitions. So as more data is added on the virtual partition, a file on the normal drive partition expands as well.
It's kind of like a disk image which is being mounted to a drive letter. All the data for it is still on the primary partition.
Hopefully that's clear enough to explain what is happening here. The extra virtual partition basically is defined as the amount of freespace on the partition to which the that virtual partition file actually resides.
In short: No miracle space here, don't bother the hard drives manufactures. Just using a feature in ghost in a weird way, but with no real benifits other than being able to boot a disk image without reszing all the partitions on your drive.
Peace
Matt
It'd be interesting to see how many people completely messed up their system doing this. Since the only way to fix it is to either copy everything off to another drive and reformat the first.