Date: Wed, 05 Oct 2005 17:41:19 -0700 From: garys@opusnet.com (Gary W. Swearingen) To: Jonathon McKitrick <jcm@FreeBSD-uk.eu.org> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Hidden spot on hard drives? Message-ID: <0bvf0bwk7k.f0b@mail.opusnet.com> In-Reply-To: <20051005184437.GA36369@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> (Jonathon McKitrick's message of "Wed, 5 Oct 2005 19:44:37 %2B0100") References: <20051005184437.GA36369@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org>
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Jonathon McKitrick <jcm@FreeBSD-uk.eu.org> writes: > 1. Any idea where this info could be stored? The obvious place is the end of the first track between the boot sector(s) and the first partition. But that's probably too easy and well-known. As others have noted, Unix (eg, "dd") has easy access to all of the standard sectors of the HDD. But I think I recall reading about some software that does some kind of special accesses of the disk drive, say to write to sector "#" and then tell the disk to mark that sector bad and use one of the spare sectors in it's place. Something tricky like that that OS code doesn't know how do without a custom driver that understands very low-level HDD control. Of course, if their software can undo it, anyone's could, but not if you don't know how, or maybe they've managed to pick the sectors cryptographically or something, making the job really tough. I've also heard of copy protection moving heads half a cylinder and storing data "between" normal tracks, but that was probably on floppies; HDD tracks probably almost overlap as it is. > 2. Any way the same thing could be done under FreeBSD? Of course, but here's no code to do it now, AFAIK.
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