From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Oct 6 00:37:57 2005 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5223A16A41F for ; Thu, 6 Oct 2005 00:37:57 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from garys@opusnet.com) Received: from opusnet.com (mail.opusnet.com [209.210.200.6]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D915643D46 for ; Thu, 6 Oct 2005 00:37:56 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from garys@opusnet.com) Received: from localhost.localhost [70.98.246.232] by opusnet.com with ESMTP (SMTPD32-8.05) id A1E0889000AC; Wed, 05 Oct 2005 17:37:52 -0700 Received: from localhost.localhost (localhost.localhost [127.0.0.1]) by localhost.localhost (8.13.3/8.13.3) with ESMTP id j960fRMW000646; Wed, 5 Oct 2005 17:41:27 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from garys@opusnet.com) Received: (from jojo@localhost) by localhost.localhost (8.13.3/8.13.3/Submit) id j960fJRX000641; Wed, 5 Oct 2005 17:41:19 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from garys@opusnet.com) To: Jonathon McKitrick References: <20051005184437.GA36369@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> From: garys@opusnet.com (Gary W. Swearingen) Date: Wed, 05 Oct 2005 17:41:19 -0700 In-Reply-To: <20051005184437.GA36369@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> (Jonathon McKitrick's message of "Wed, 5 Oct 2005 19:44:37 +0100") Message-ID: <0bvf0bwk7k.f0b@mail.opusnet.com> User-Agent: Gnus/5.1007 (Gnus v5.10.7) XEmacs/21.4.17 (Jumbo Shrimp, berkeley-unix) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Hidden spot on hard drives? X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2005 00:37:57 -0000 Jonathon McKitrick 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.