gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials » drive http://www.ghacks.net A technology news blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Sat, 11 Feb 2012 09:52:46 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 How To Place Drives In The Windows 7 Taskbarhttp://www.ghacks.net/2010/07/06/how-to-place-drives-in-the-windows-7-taskbar/ http://www.ghacks.net/2010/07/06/how-to-place-drives-in-the-windows-7-taskbar/#comments Tue, 06 Jul 2010 08:53:45 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/?p=27969 Only specific programs can be pinned to the Windows 7 Taskbar by default, there is no option to pin files, folders or drives to it. We have already demonstrated how to pin files and folders to the windows 7 Taskbar, and today we are going to explain how to add drives to the taskbar as well.

Placing drive shortcuts on the taskbar speeds up the process of accessing those drives. The standard options to open drives in Windows Explorer are to either double-click the computer icon and then the drive or to click the Windows Explorer icon and then the drive. Both operations require more clicks than the taskbar solution.

Here is what you need to do to place drive icons in the windows 7 Taskbar.

Right-click the computer desktop and select New > Text Document. Rename the document to Drive-X.exe. Make sure the extension is changed to exe. Replace X with the drive letter.

Now drag the new file to the Windows Taskbar and delete the file on the desktop afterwards. Right-click the icon on the Taskbar, move the mouse over the name, right-click on the name and selected properties.

drive link

drive link

Now edit both the target and start in fields so that they show only the drive path and no folders, for instance c:\ in both if a link to drive C should be placed in the taskbar.

drive windows 7 taskbar

drive windows 7 taskbar

You can optionally change the icon by clicking on change icon. That change however will only become active on the next logon, restart or if the explorer.exe process is restarted.

It is a good idea to select different icons for every drive that is added to the taskbar in Windows 7 to make the recognition easier.

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2010/07/06/how-to-place-drives-in-the-windows-7-taskbar/feed/ 5 Change all the icons that you want in windowshttp://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/19/change-all-the-icons-that-you-want-in-windows/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/19/change-all-the-icons-that-you-want-in-windows/#comments Fri, 19 Jan 2007 18:01:03 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/19/change-all-the-icons-that-you-want-in-windows/ The freeware IconX makes it possible to change any icon that you can get your hands on in Windows. It takes care of file type and specific files, folders and even drives. The installation is pretty simple. Download the IconX software and right-click IconX.inf and select install to install the shell extension. Please note that you need to write the author to receive a validation code because the software was shareware and is now freeware.

After all of this is done right-click a file, folder or drive and select Change Icon from the context menu. A window pops up showing the path to the file, folder or drive. You will have to choose a icon library, some of which can be loaded from the developers page, and all the icons of that library will be displayed.

Just click on the icon that you want to use and use the optional “Use icon for all files of that type” if you wish that as well. Changes will be visible immediately and you can repeat the process if you don’t like the icon anymore.

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/19/change-all-the-icons-that-you-want-in-windows/feed/ 3 How to clone your hard driveshttp://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/14/how-to-clone-your-hard-drives/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/14/how-to-clone-your-hard-drives/#comments Sun, 14 Jan 2007 15:41:37 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/14/how-to-clone-your-hard-drives/ A recent forum post from ffolke at the ghacks forum asked about a free method to clone a hard drive to another one. There are actually several freeware tools out there that can do this and they distinguish each other mostly by ease of use and interface. The one tool that I would use for such a purpose is called DriveImage XML which supports SATA drivesn external hard drives and flash memory such as that of my iPod Nano.

Drive Image XML has a real nice gui which can be run in Windows. To clone a hard drive to another one click on the drive to drive entry on the lower left side of the main window. Drive Image XML scans all drives that are currently connected to your computer and displays them all in a list. Just select a drive that you do want to clone in the first step. After that you may select to use a raw mode copy which would copy all of the sectors of the drive to another one which means that even the unused sectors would be cloned to the new location.

The hot imaging strategies only apply if you clone a drive that is currently in use. Drive Image XML tries first to lock the drive and make everything read only for the time of creating the clone and if that fails use the Volume Shadow Service to create a shadow copy of the file that can’t be locked.

Once that is set you select the drive that you want to clone the files to. Again all drives connected to the computer are available to choose from.  You should make sure to select a drive that is at least slightly larger than the drive that you want to clone.

Please note that all data on the destination partition will be overwritten and deleted in the process. I would suggest to create a partition just for cloning the drive to make sure that no data is ever overwritten or deleted on the destination drive.

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