Of striped hard drive...

["Jean-Francois Avon" <jf_avon@citenet.net>]

Hi!  I'm the one who originally posted the disk stripe question.

I asked it more as a rhetorical question than anything.  I asked my computer 
technician (he's the one who told me the story) if he could show me just where 
to find this striping, and he said that he did not do it himself.

Since the story has some technical plausability, I enquired just in case, more 
out of technical curiosity than anything else.

I asked my tech if fdisk-ing the disk with OS/2 fdisk or with Linux fdisk 
would overwrite the potential striping (MS fdisk sucks more than anything else 
I've seen!) and he said that he did not know.  Now, mind you, this guy is NOT 
a twit, like you might be inclined to believe.

This is why I posted the enquiry.  After all, if it is possible, why should we 
assume that nobody will try to exploit it?  History (in general, and history 
of computers, and history of the Internet) shows that if there is some 
exploitable characteristic, it most likely will get exploited... 


On Sat, 20 Feb 1999 07:12:34 -0500, Jay Holovacs wrote:

>The disk stripe is a new one to me, but would require MS to directly
>address parts of your hd that the formatter doesn't even touch (which would
>be drive brand specific) through your browser, that sounds pretty unlikely
>to me. Besides, even if they did, what would that large expense and PR risk
>do for MS? They may want to leave an identifier on your machine besides
>cookies, but there is no practical point to attempting to survive (quite
>rare) full reformatting. I don't believe it.
>
>Now, if your talking FBI, targeting specific individuals (as opposed to
>fishing), it would be technically possible.
>
>Jay


Now, technically, where are the most likely places to locate such a stripe so 
that it is likely to survive fdisk and formatting?

Ciao

jfa