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 Post subject: 65536 hidden sectors in WD USB drives after SATA conversion
PostPosted: August 22nd, 2026, 17:00 
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Joined: September 8th, 2009, 18:21
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Location: Australia
The attached screenshot is from this MRT video which explains how to access a WD USB drive in SATA mode:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/kZK9ltcHWcs

The capacity reported via SATA (not USB) is 3906963632 sectors. This is 65536 sectors less than the IDEMA standard capacity, 3907029168. I have seen this behaviour in other threads. In those threads an examination of module 0x02 reveals that all 5 capacity parameters reflect the full IDEMA capacity, not the actual reported capacity. This same reported capacity is visible in the drive's Identify Device info sector when accessed via Linux, so it is not some artifact of PC3K or MRT.

The capacity reported via the native USB interface is even less by a few thousand sectors.

In another thread the difference was 65535 sectors rather than 65536.

What is going on? Where is this capacity value coming from?


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 Post subject: Re: 65536 hidden sectors in WD USB drives after SATA convers
PostPosted: Yesterday, 10:45 
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Joined: July 10th, 2022, 15:11
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I'm not entirely sure because I've only had this problem once and I haven't analyzed it that deeply, but maybe encryption and a boot partition for the WDunlocker application will be a clue?..

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 Post subject: Re: 65536 hidden sectors in WD USB drives after SATA convers
PostPosted: Yesterday, 11:25 
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Lukas wrote:
I'm not entirely sure because I've only had this problem once and I haven't analyzed it that deeply, but maybe encryption and a boot partition for the WDunlocker application will be a clue?..

Normally it is the USB bridge firmware that hides the "SmartWare" area from the OS, but when the bridge is removed, the full UA is exposed. However, in this case there are still some hidden sectors even after the drive is accessed directly via SATA and the bridge is eliminated. I'm wondering whether the drive knows that the end of the UA is reserved for an encryption key, and perhaps this restricted access is a recently introduced security feature. The bridge firmware would know how to access this area, possibly via a new VSC.

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