Accessing 'hidden' sectors on hard drives

Raphael Marmier raphael at marmier.net
Fri Sep 2 00:03:09 PDT 2005


And what happens when two programs use "sector 32" for storing their 
copy protection key? ;)

cheers

Raphael

Jonathon McKitrick wrote:
I was reading recently about a copy protection scheme that stores data in
sector 32, which is apparently right after the partition info, correct?
The scheme I am looking at claims to defeat Norton Ghost and yet survive a
format... probably not low-level.  However, they will not reveal the details
of where the license info is, except to say it is not 'in the filesystem.'
Do these unused, reserved, or 'system' sectors exist on a UFS/FFS hard disk?
If I am 'dangerously dedicated,' does that extra space go away?  Is there any
way a copy protection scheme could be devised under FreeBSD that could access
that area, or another area beyond the reach of the filesystem?
Jonathon McKitrick
--
Hoppiness is a good beer.





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