how to use “Unusable” sectors outside defined partition boundaries

Question

What might be a convenient way to stash some hidden data in the "Unusable" area following the last partition, or anywhere outside defined partition boundaries? For example, making it appear as a /dev/___ ready for I/O to my userspace programs.

Let's say I don't care if partitioning programs or bootloaders don't recognize that there might be something important there and step on it; I'd do a structure sanity check & re-create data as needed.

                             cfdisk (util-linux 2.19.1)

                                Disk Drive: /dev/sda
                         Size: 160041885696 bytes, 160.0 GB
               Heads: 255   Sectors per Track: 63   Cylinders: 19457

 Name     Flags     Part Type   FS Type        [Label]        Size (MB) 
 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 sda1                Primary    vfat           [ACER]         25827.38   
 sda2                Primary    ntfs                          90033.92
                                       Unusable               13193.35
 sda3                Primary    ext4                          16508.14
 sda4     Boot       Primary    ext4                          14476.50
                                       Unusable                   2.62  *

Answer 1

You really should just define a partition to contain the space. You also should leave the first 63 sectors of the disk alone or you will break your boot loader ( more troublesome than the boot loader breaking your data ).

You can use losetup to create a loop device and point it to the specific section of the drive if you really want:

losetup -o start --sizelimit size /dev/loop0 /dev/sda

Where start and size are the start offset and size of the area in bytes.

Of course, if you get the values wrong, you'll trash your FS.

Answer 2

I would create a little filesystem in the wasted space. To bootstrap the process:

1. Create a regular file (using dd) that matches the size of the "unusable" region of the drive.
2. Use losetup to associate the regular file with a loop device.
3. Use mkfs to create a filesystem on the loop device.
4. Use losetup to detach the loop device.
5. Use dd to copy the regular file to the "unusable" region of the drive.

Every time you want to access the data:

1. Copy the "unusable" region of the drive (using dd) to a regular file.
2. Use losetup to associate the file with a loop device.
3. Use fsck on the loop device to check filesystem integrity. If something has stomped on the filesystem, you'll have to repeat the bootstrapping steps. Nothing should be writing to this area of the disk, so if the filesystem is getting stomped, it likely means you're overwriting part of an active disk partition. (!)
4. Use mount to mount the loop device as a filesystem.
5. Access the data.
6. Use umount to unmount the filesystem.
7. Use losetup to detach the loop device.
8. Use dd to copy the regular file back to the "unusable" region of the drive.

You can access the whole drive through the device name without the partition numbers, in your case that's /dev/sda. You'll need to use dd's skip= parameter to read from the drive and seek= to write to it in the correct place. If you get the block seek count wrong when writing to the drive you will overwrite one of your disk partitions.

Answer 3

The problem with your partition table is that it contains 4 primary partitions that do not fill the disk. That is the reason the remaining space is marked "unusable", because there is no way to add a partition to use it.

If you replace one of your partitions by an "extended" partition, you will be able to create more than 4 partitions and use the whole disk without problem.