On Tue, Jul 05, 2005 at 08:31:31AM +1000, Rod.. Whitworth wrote: > I was able to do some work on a desktop drive a while back from an IBM > desktop box and I had no luck working out how to get to the missing > space to back it up. Mrs Google got lots of hits but if there was a > signal in there I didn't hear it due to all the noise. > > Does anybody here know how the space is hidden and how to unhide/rehide > it so as to do what I want?
There's a flag in the standard (ha-ha) x86 partition table that allows you to hide the partition. Aside from that, it's a matter of having tools that allow you to do what you want to do. A BSD disklabel need pay no particular respect to the BIOS, and once you have the raw sector numbers of the partition, you can dd the data anywhere you want. It shouldn't be too wasteful, because they typically compress the data and don't partition more space than they have to. But in all likelihood, there's a FAT or FAT32 filesystem, and whatever lame restore program they have looks at the third primary partition, or whatever, assumes it's going to find a FAT filesystem and possibly a Symantec Ghost image fo the OS partition as shipped, or some other files (necessarily split into 2 GB pieces on a FAT filesystem) to restore the dsik. Intelligent guesswork + disk powertools that do what you tell them to do and don't ask questions. You should probably image the *whole* disk before you do anything. -- Adam Fabian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
