Hidden spot on hard drives?

[Peter Clutton]

On 10/6/05, Kirk Strauser <kirk at strauser.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday 05 October 2005 01:44 pm, Jonathon McKitrick wrote:
> > the company where I work (with Windows) is evaluating a copy protection
> > product that stores info somewhere on the HDD where the [1] user cannot
> > touch it, [2] a format will not erase it, [3] and Norton Ghost will not find
> > it.
>
> 1) No such animal.
> 2) Ah - the bootblock, as others have mentioned.
> 3) Of course, that doesn't say anything about Ghost v$(current + 1).
>
> To be blunt, your vendor is lying to you.

I'm not quite so unbelieving. I mean there are always ways to get at
data, hell,
you could just rip the drive out and take a hex image. But that isn't
the point.
There are software and hardware devices which can do this for you, and their
claim could be true to a certain extent.

There are a few other places to hide data: servo tracks, and tracks
where data about bad sectors are kept, but this sometimes requires
hardware to write to it.

Just my two cents on an interesting subject:)