On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 2:13 PM, Mark Lord <liml@xxxxxx> wrote: > Greg Freemyer wrote: >> >> On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 1:08 PM, Mark Lord <liml@xxxxxx> wrote: > > .. >>> >>> Mmm.. never thought about that much before now, >>> but DCO is a nifty way to hide much of a drive from prying eyes. >>> Eg. Use DCO to restrict the drive to LBA28 accessible sectors >>> and also turn off LBA48 support, and then a lot of space becomes >>> "hidden". >>> Until now! >> >> Yeah, combine that with some HPA shenanigans and you can create two >> complete disk partition layouts on one drive. >> >> ie. Two partition tables, the normal partition table for the first 128 >> GiB is in sector 1. The partition table for the rest of the disk is >> at sector 128 GiB + 1. Then use DCO to totally hide the upper section >> of the drive. >> >> When you want access, use DCO commands to expose it, and then HPA >> commands to make only the sectors beyond 128 GiB accessible. > > .. > > Now that one has me stumped. The only HPA commands I know of, > permit setting only the maximum-LBA, not the minimum. > Or is this a newish ATA9 (or last-minute ATA8) sort of thing ? > .. >> >> to the end of the disk, then issue a "hpa swap" command. That will >> hide the first 128 GiB and expose the rest of the disk. > > .. > > Yeah.. what's this "hpa swap" ? Possibly a vendor-specific op, perhaps? > > Cheers > Mark, I don't know the details, but I have a DOS program called "setoff" that is about 10 years old that I have tested on at least a couple LBA-28 drives and it works. I doubt it works on LBA-48, but who knows. More comments after the readme quote >> From the Readme ========================================= SETOFF - This program will offset the numbering of sectors in the drive to a new starting sector, the location of the new starting sector is the starting sector of an existing HPA. Basically SETOFF will tell the drive that has a HPA on it to make the HPA visible as the normal drive area and place the normal drive area as a HPA. It switches the HPA and normal drive area with each other. Example of SETOFF use; SETOFF - Shows help screen SETOFF 0 0 1 - This will engage sector off set on the Master drive on the Primary IDE port For example, say you have a drive with 12,000,000 (6Gbytes) sectors. You have a HPA that starts at sector 8,000,000. This would give you a drive that has 4Gbytes of user space and a HPA of 2Gbytes. Your computer would only see a 4Gbyte drive when it boots up. Remember the HPA is not seen by the computer normally. You could then use SETOFF to make the 2Gbyte HPA the user space and the 4 Gbyte user space would become the HPA. Great way to hide stuff isn't it. --- Ok that's it. Any questions call or email me. I have a Power Point that covers all of this rather well for classes and an exercise to use as well. MarkMenz@xxxxxxx or (916) 983-0348 =========== Mark Menz used to make his software available under restricted circumstances. I don't remember what the restrictions are. Possibly he just charged for them. Or they may have been Law Enforcement only. If you want to talk to him and the above contact info is bad, I'm sure we can find him for you. I believe his more recent products (hardware) are described at www.MyKeyTech.com HTH Greg -- Greg Freemyer Litigation Triage Solutions Specialist http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregfreemyer First 99 Days Litigation White Paper - http://www.norcrossgroup.com/forms/whitepapers/99%20Days%20whitepaper.pdf The Norcross Group The Intersection of Evidence & Technology http://www.norcrossgroup.com -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
