Writes to Hard Disk Going Beyond Capacity

[Patrick Donnelly]

On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 4:01 AM, Giorgos Keramidas
<keramida at ceid.upatras.gr> wrote:
> On Sat, 10 Jul 2010 03:10:31 -0400, Patrick Donnelly <batrick at batbytes.com> wrote:
>> Hi List,
>>
>> I have a strange problem in a C program I wrote. I open a hard
>> disk character file (/dev/ad1) and attempt to write over the
>> entire disk. I expect the last write that would go beyond the
>> hard disk length (capacity) to return with an error but instead
>> the write succeeds.  This happens for hundreds of gigabytes
>> beyond the file (hard drive) length. What could be wrong? (This
>> program works fine on Linux. The last write that would go
>> beyond the end of the hard drive returns with -1.)
>>
>> Thanks for any help,
>
> Can we see the exact source code of the program?  What you
> describe might work if the file has holes inside it.

http://www.batbytes.com/destroy

Specifically, after filling the hard drive it will begin to rapidly
"write" where the throughput of the writes is about 10 GB/s (obviously
not going to the hard drive).

-- 
- Patrick Donnelly