[marysol5]

>It does, but it's extremely unusual for the feature to be in use on modern hardware.

FAT is a filesystem, it isn't hardware. They're talking about the table storing numbers of bad sectors/blocks.

The system you just described is exactly what TrueCrypt did, where if you overwrote the capacity and into the "hidden" data, you'd end up killing the hidden partition.

[Retr0id]

Modern hardware tries not expose bad sectors to the filesystem layer at all, they are managed by the drive firmware (transparently remapped, until the drive runs out of spare sectors). Thus, you will ~never see bad sectors marked in the FAT on modern hardware.