This hidden space on hard drives is stupid and always has been. Its ALL just theory, u may get a bit but its all theory and YES manus do class hard drives a smaller size if they dont meet whatever size.

and this is the babelfished translate for english spoken user from the above posted url The English new magazine The Inquirer describes a procedure, how one the non removable disk capacity allegedly around 50 - 150% to increase can. By means of Norton Ghost and a second plate with boatable system one can along-use the ranges reserved by the disk manufacturer. These have actually to be replaced in addition there defective sectors. Besides there is the restriction that the "again won" place can be used only as specially partition. The Partitionieren of the whole plate with a large partition is not possible. The results look interesting, then a 200GB Serial ATA plate could be extended by max gate on 510GB. Even an older Seagate IDE plate could be increased by 20GB on nevertheless 30GB. In any case ones one should still further comments wait for and in no case without Backup of all data changes in the non removable disk make. Here the old slogan applies: Data without Backup are to be regarded as deleted. Besides the danger of overruns increases substantially with the described procedure, since the plate cannot surround defective sectors to no more into the before times free ranges. Further no experiences are available over the long-term enterprise. We can warn here thus for the time being once only of this change, until there are messages from non removable disk manufacturers and more empiric reports. Update: As it turned out with this method the partition table is changed in such a way that a virtual partition develops, which is with the original partition. If one writes now data into one of the partitions, also data of the other partition are overwritten at the same time. Under any circumstances unused storage location on the non removable disk is not thus used, but in the final result, vorgaukelt more place provides an incorrect partition table to possess. The method is thus ineffective and should be used therefore in no case, since one only risks thereby its data unnecessarily. Thus fingers away!