gHacks technology news » hard-drive

Hard Drive Profiler

Martin — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 08:47:12 +0000

There is no easy way of keeping a manual overview of file and folder changes on a particular hard drive. Several types of changes would have to be monitored including deletion, creation and modifications of files and folders on the hard drive.

The HDD Profiler provides a semi-automated way of monitoring a specific hard drive or folder for these changes. The portable software program creates snapshots of selected folders. These snapshots can then be loaded into the software program at a later time to compare them with the current state of the hard drive or folder. The Hard Drive Profiler will then display the changes that have been made in the meantime (that is the time between the initial snapshot and comparison) in various tabs that provide an excellent overview.

The computer program will for instance notice new and deleted folders and files or modified file names and files. It will basically catch any modification in the monitored folders or hard drives and report them in its interface. The changes that have been noticed can be saved in a log file so that they can be accessed at a later time in the application. The format can also be opened in text editors.

The interface is divided into various tabs including removed files, modified files or accessed files that make it easier to spot specific modifications. HDD Profiler can be downloaded from the developer’s website. The program is compatible with Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 9x and Windows ME according to the homepage. It is likely that it will work under Windows Vista or Windows 7 as well.

Tags: hard drive profiler, hard-drive, hdd profiler, monitor hard drives, portable software, windows software

External Hard Drives: How do I Choose Which One to Buy

Cheryl — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 15:45:39 +0000

Lately, I’ve realized that my computer is full of data and is close to its limit. Normally, I burn data onto a CD or DVD and then delete it off my system. The problem is that over time, the CDs have developed a few unreadable areas. So, I’ve pretty much lost a few chunks of data.

To combat this problem, I’ve decided its time for me to buy an external hard drive. I figure 500 GB is more than enough for me right now. What’s confusing me though is choosing which hard drive to buy. I’ve settled on a 2.5″ drive that draws power from the USB port so I won’t have to worry about an external power source. After a fair amount of research and considering my budget, I’ve narrowed my choice down to these two:

Seagate FreeAgent Go
Transcend StoreJet 25M

I’m getting a lot of conflicting reviews about both drives which is why I’m asking the Ghacks readers to help me make my decision. Here are some of my queries:

Multiple OS support: My primary computer runs Windows XP but I also own a laptop that’s running Ubuntu. I’d prefer something that works out of the box with both but I’m not averse to a little tweaking if necessary.

Partitioning: Would I need to partition my drive? I’m planning to segregate the data according to its format but can I just copy everything on it or should I create dedicated partitions? Should I leave some space free in case I want to install a portable version of an OS?

Durability: What’s the point in spending all that cash if my HD’s going to conk out after a while? Is build quality a factor and how long can I expect the drive to last?

What do you think of my choices? Have I missed anything out? What are you using for external storage and are you happy with it? Let me know in the comments.

Tags: ask the readers, hard-drive, Hardware, portable storage

Hard Drive Health Monitoring

Martin — Thu, 14 May 2009 11:52:18 +0000

Active Hard Disk Monitor is a hard drive health monitoring software that displays information about a computer system’s hard drive state. It analyzes and displays S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) information provided by compatible hard drives. Other features are hard drive performance monitoring and control, bad sector scanning as well as event logs and reports. The software program displays all connected and supported in the left sidebar and detailed information about the active hard drive in the larger right window.

Additional information and tabs are provided at the bottom which display information about a hard drive’s work time, model, temperature and health status. The first tab which is the active tab after selecting a hard drive will display detailed basic information about the selected drive including serial number and the firmware version. The next two tabs contain information about the S.M.A.R.T. status of the active hard drive and a temperature graph that displays the hard drive’s temperature changes over time.

The fourth tab can be used to scan the selected hard drive for bad sectors. The very same menu offers to schedule disk scans. A viable alternative is Speedfan which combines all of the possibilities offered by Active Hard Disk Monitor with advanced information and options including the display of all relevant system temperatures and fan speeds. The information and options are however not presented that clearly as in Active Hard Disk Monitor.

Active Hard Disk Monitor is compatible with many Microsoft operating systems including 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003 / 2008.

Tags: active hard disk monitor, hard drive health, hard drive monitoring, hard-drive, smart, speedfan, Windows, windows software

Dedicated Server Disk Wipes

Martin — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 07:18:00 +0000

System administrators do not have physical access to dedicated servers. These servers are usually hosted by a web hosting company in a secured data center. Most dedicated servers are rented for a certain period of time and then passed on to the next customer. While some dedicated server hosters securely wipe and format the hard drives before they are made available again some only format them. Reason for this might be time but also missing knowledge that data can be restored if it is not wiped securely from the server drives.

A recent discussion over at the Donation Coder forum touched that subject. A user noticed that he was able to restore data from a dedicated server that was rented by someone else before. This can have some serious implications. Dedicated servers can hold all kinds of sensible data including user accounts, passwords, business databases, email addresses, personal information, photos, media and documents. Many of these can still be restored if the hard drives are not wiped correctly which obviously can be very problematic not only from a business point of view but also from a private view depending on the kind of data that has been stored on the hard drives of the dedicated server.

There are two possibilities to ensure that no third party will have access to the data stored on the server drives. Option A would be to purchase the hard drive from the web hosting company. Most will not have problems selling hard drives to their customers for a premium. This is actually a good option for most companies as it would mean that they will have physical access to the hard drive that has been in their dedicated server.

The second option is to wipe the hard drive of the dedicated server securely before the contract ends. The possible solutions are limited as the server has to be running to be able to remotely access it. One way to wipe a specific hard drive or partition of a dedicated server is to issue the following command:

shred -f -z -v -u /dev/sda

This will wipe /dev/sda, you might need to change that. The process will take some time obviously. The parameters mean the following:

-f: force, changes permission levels to allow writing if necessary
-z: zeroes, will overwrite the entire disk with zeroes in the end
-v: verbose, display the progress
-u: remove, truncates and remove file after overwriting

Tags: dedicated server, disk wipe, hard-drive, server, web hosting, wipe

Visualize your hard drive consumption with SpaceSniffer

Daniel Pataki — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:20:08 +0000

No matter what hard drive size you have, if you spend a lot of time on your computer, you will fill it up eventually. A lot of times I have 1Gb stuff which I don’t need and can safely throw out, I just never bump into these because they are outside my normal file browsing habits. If you want to save some space by deleting the larges unwanted files, or just want a cool way to visualize your hard drive, give SpaceSniffer a go.

With no install needed, just run it, select a drive and watch as the table structure fills up with folders and sub-folders. You can double click on any folder to bring it into main view (cool animation here), so you can see more detail. If you’ve zoomed in on a folder you can click the name again to zoom back out, or you can use the forward and back buttons like on a browser.

There are options to show unknown space, free space, but apart from that this app is a simple hard drive space analyzer, but a really very well made one. It is beautiful, it is elegant and it gives you the information you need in a form very easily digested by the human mind. I simply love this app, if you can and you like it too, please consider donating to them. (via Freeware Genius)

Tags: hard-drive, system tools

Hard Disk Serial Number Changer

Martin — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 21:14:21 +0000

Whenever a hard drive is formatted in Windows a serial number is assigned in the end. This serial number is often used by software applications to restrict a software installation to that hard drive or reduce the number of allowed activations by one by linking the serial number of the hard drive to one of the allowed activations.

This should not be confused with the hardware serial number that gets added in the manufacturing process. The Hard Disk Serial Number Changer (link) can change the serial number that gets assigned when a hard drive is formatted in Windows. This can be really useful if an existing hard drive has to be formatted without loosing an activation or software association. It can also come in handy if a new hard drive is added to a computer system to replace an older one especially if software needs to be transferred or reinstalled on that new hard drive.

The software program is portable and can therefor be executed directly after finishing the download. The program will provide access to all drive letters of connected hard drives and floppy drives and their assigned serial numbers.

A click in the Serial Number text field allows to edit the existing serial which has to be in the form XXXX-XXXX with only hex symbols allowed.

Tags: hard disk software, hard-disk, hard-drive, portable software, serial number, windows software

Analyse your hard disk and stop wasting space

Joe — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 23:05:10 +0000

Your hard disk space may seem increasingly small but you may not be aware what is taking the space. I, for example, subscribed to dozens of podcasts but naively overlooked them when trying to clear space. In fact, they took up 5GB of space!

Whilst disk space is no longer seen as a problem, considering 1GB only costs about $0.20! However, I find it an issue on my MacBook where I only have 120GB of space and it can’t easily be expanded.

Finding hogs could be quite a task. Naturally, trawling through every directory is impractical, so automated tools must be used to find large directories and files. Software exists on most major operating systems to graphically show which folders are large and how large they are.

In 2005, gHacks reported about WinDirStat. This is freeware that shows how big directories are. WinDirStat displays everything in the C:\ (etc) drive, colour coded for the first level directory (eg Program Files or Windows), and on tiers below that it is divided as blocks. This is a easy to use visualisation. WinDirStat runs on all Windows operating systems from 95 (w/IE5) to Vista!

An OS X alternative to WinDirStat is Disk Inventory X. It is essentially identical to WinDirStat. GrandPerspective is another essentially identical option.

Linux users can choose between KDirStat or Baobab.

Another option is JDiskReport is a Java-based piece of software which analyses disk usage using pie charts. Presumably this will work on Windows, OS X and Linux.

Tags: directory, disk space, files, freeware, hard-disk, hard-drive, Linux, mac, optimise, optimization, optimize, os x, software, Tools, windirstat, Windows

Hard Drive Data Retrieval

Martin — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 12:37:31 +0000

Disk Investigator is a pretty unique hard drive data retrieval tool that takes a totally different approach than the usual hard drive data recovery tools. What Disk Investigator does is to provide direct access to the raw data sectors of a selected hard drive so that the hard drive’s data can be explored up to the last bit.

The user can perform a sector to sector analysis of the hard drive, display the raw file contents or perform a search on the selected hard drive or partition.

The default view can be switched between disk and directories view. While the disk view is displaying the hard drive data sectors the directories view is providing access to the file structure. A click on a file will open a raw file data viewer in a separate browser

So what will you find when your run a search or analyze the data on the hard drive? You will be able to discover opened urls, passwords, email contents, document contents and more. The easiest way to discover the data is by performing a search for it. You might be surprised at the wealth of information that can be discovered when running Disk Investigator.

Another possible use for this software is to make sure that a disk wipe was successful. The software program works with most versions of the Windows operating system including Windows XP but with the exception of Windows Vista.

Tags: data retrieval, data retrieval tool, data-recovery, hard drive data, Hard Drive Data Retrieval, hard-drive, windows software

Disk Space Analyzer

Martin — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 17:39:58 +0000

Free Disk Analyzer is a free software program for computers running Microsoft Windows that will display information about the computer’s storage devices. The interface looks like a pretty Windows Explorer clone concentrating on disk space usage on the computer’s drives and folders.

The program displays all connected storage devices, their capacity, free space and occupied space in the beginning and it is up to the user to narrow down the data by using the computer browser in the left pane.

A click on a drive letter will start an in depth disk space analysis of that drive which will display all files and folders from that root level on sorted by their size. It is possible to sort by name, type or date modified instead. A click on a folder will load the contents of that folder and display the data accordingly.

The Windows Explorer context menu is available after a right-click on a file or folder which means it is possible to perform operations like opening or deleting them right in the program’s interface.

The display mode can be switched to display only the files or folders sorted by size again. These two display modes are excellent to identify the largest (or smallest) files or folders on a specific drive or in a folder.

Files are sorted by their size and additional information like the filename, location and their relative size on the hard drive are listed. The folder display mode contains the same information plus information about the number of files and the average file size.

Links to drive cleanup and drive tools are provided for each drive letter in the general display mode. Cleanup will run the drive cleanup tool that is supplied with Windows while Disk Tools will display the disk properties of that disk.

Tags: disk space, Disk Space Analyzer, disk tools, free disk analyzer, hard-drive, windows software

Drive Manager

Martin — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 08:28:17 +0000

If you have lots of different drives connected to your computer, like hard drives, usb drives, network drives, CD or DVD drives and flash cards then you might have noticed that the functionality to manage those drives effectively is severely limited in Windows. Drive Manager is trying to change that by providing one interface for all connected drives.

The portable software will display a list of all connected drives upon execution listing information like the drive letter, available and used disk space, the drive type, the percentage of free space and the vendor and the product ID. Certain types of drives (local, CD/DVD, removable, network, not mounted) can be excluded from the display to optimize it further.

A double-click on a drive will open the root directory of the drive in Windows Explorer. More interesting than that are probably the Disk Info and SMART buttons in the main toolbar which display a wealth of information about the selected drive.

Additional options include the ability to hide drives in Windows Explorer and to use the Subst command to create a drive letter for a local folder. There are also options to map network drives, check and benchmark hard drives, eject or lock optical drives and links to tools like defrag. All of these options are available from the main interface of the drive manager application.

Tags: disk information, disk manager, hard drive manager, hard-drive, portable software, windows software, windows-explorer

Hard Drive Diagnostic Tool Crystal Disk Info

Martin — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 17:45:30 +0000

Crystal Disk Info has been covered before at Ghacks as a tool to display the hours a hard drive has been running. The hard drive diagnostic tool can do a lot more than that however but more about that later in the article. The software program is a portable application that can immediately displays information about connected hard drives (IDE, SATA and SSD) like the current transfer mode, the power on count and the power on hours.

Other important information include the hard drive’s temperature, the health status, the drive letters and supported features. The tool is displaying the S.M.A.R.T. attributes in a list in the main interface. The information are updated regularly. The default value is every 10 minutes but it can be changed from 1 to 60 minutes. It obviously can also be disabled.

An interesting feature of Crystal Disk Info is the ability to control change the Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM) and Advanced Power Management (APM) settings of hard drives that support the feature

Sliders can be used to change the Automatic Acoustic Management between Silent and Performance and the Advanced Power Management between Minimal Power and Performance.

The download is currently not working on the software developer’s homepage. All major download portals (Majorgeeks) host the software on the other hand.

The software is compatible with all 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.

Tags: Advanced Power Management, Automatic Acoustic Management, crystal disk info, Hard Drive Diagnostic, hard-drive, jard drive software, portable software, software, windows software

Visualize Hard Drive Space

Martin — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 08:45:32 +0000

I covered software programs or Windows Explorer extensions that would display hard drive space usage before. (for example Folder Size or JDiskReport Hard Drive Analyser) FoSiX is another tool that displays the storage consumption of each system partition that, hard drive and external device that is currently connected to the computer.

The software provides a clean interface. It is a bit unfortunate that one has to press the scan button before the storage consumption of a hard drive is shown in the main window. It would have been more elegant to make that an automatic option after clicking on the drive letter.

Still, the files in the root folder and all of its subfolders are displayed once the scan of a drive has finished. Each folder is listed with it’s space consumption on the drive. A nice feature is the ability to click on a folder to be taken to the next level of that folder where the program is again showing all subfolders and the amount of storage space they take up.

That makes it an elegant solution to discover the biggest “space offenders” in a particular directory on the selected drive. The software provides some additional tools like cleaning temporary files on the system, shortcuts or Internet Explorer traces. Nothing that good old CCleaner could not handle as well.

Tags: hard drive analyser, hard-disk, hard-drive, software, storage consumption, Windows

System Partitioning with Vista

joshua — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:30:01 +0000

System Partitioning is a little scary, especially if your as stupid as me and don’t back your files up before you start.

I have been using Ubuntu installed through Wubi, a very convenient and efficient way for anyone to try out Linux beyond a Live CD or Virtual machine.

While Wubi is great It does have a couple limitations, firstly with hibernation and suspend modes, neither of which work. Not an issue for a desktop PC, but for me using my laptop quite a big drawback. Secondly, apparently installing through Wubi gives a small performance hit to Ubuntu, although I wouldn’t know how true this is.

I decided to dual-boot my Vista system with Ubuntu, however had some difficulties with getting the Vista partitioning tool to shrink the main volume.

Vista has the disk management tool which is a little more advanced then the XP counterpart and allows you to shrink, expand and create partitions on the hard drives. It can be a pretty frustrating tool and has a particular aversion to shrinking partitions.

My first attempt got me this message:

There are a variety of reasons why there was no space to create a partition, here they are and also the method you can fix it with:

Not enough HDD space

Delete as many files as you can
Reduce the Recycle bin size (by default it takes 10% HDD space)
Run the disk cleaner and get rid of hibernation and temporary files
Remove all but the most recent System Restore points

Paging Files

Disable virtual memory for now

Defragment

Use a tool like Auslogic Defragmenter
MFT files, such as you can see below, on the the end of a volume will prevent partition shrinking. They’re a pain to move and I don’t have an answer for that one.

Clean

Use a tool like CCleaner to track down any temporary and junk files which Windows misses.

Hopefully this helps you if you find yourself in the same situation. However that said there are no guarantees, the longer you’ve been using your PC the harder it will be to resize partitions without a complete reinstall. Make you reactivate anything you turned off such as System Restore.

Tags: hard-drive, partition, vista partitioning, windows vista tips, windows-vista

Got My SSD, Any Questions Or Suggestions?

Martin — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 20:53:43 +0000

Okay the Solid State Drive that I ordered on Sunday arrived today and I thought it would be nice to give everyone the chance to ask questions about it and point to tests that they would like me to run to see how the SSD performs in a normal computer environment in comparison to those lab tests that you see the results of all the time.

Some information about the drive. I ordered an OCZ 64 Gigabyte Core Series Sata II 2.5″ Solid State Drive which can be connected with the normal SATA cables. It’s pretty tiny, completely silent and I had to think a bit before I found a placement in my computer for it. Since I’m not moving my computer I put it on top of the 3,5″ bay.

It was immediately recognized by the Bios if my computer and by Windows without having to install drivers or do a Bios update. Keep in mind that I have a relatively new Bios from January 2008 though.

The only thing that I did so far was to install Windows XP on the drive and do all the driver and system updates. I have not installed any applications except for Firefox and Thunderbird yet.

Please point me to any benchmarking tests or other tests that you would like to have performed so that we can evaluate how fast the drive actually is. I’m thinking of benchmarking system start and startup of several applications that I will install on both hard drives. (I have another Windows XP system on my old hard drive).

So, if you got anything let me know and I will perform the test if I can grab the right software to do it.

Tags: hard-disk, hard-drive, Hardware, solid state drive, ssd

What Would You do with a 1.5 Terabyte Hard Drive?

Cheryl — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 16:57:56 +0000

When I got my first computer, my hard drive was all of 2.1 Gigabytes. At that time, it was a huge amount and I didn’t think I’d ever run out of disk space. Fast forward to 2008 and my current configuration includes two hard drives, one of which can hold 250 GB.

At current status, my hard drive is sufficient for my needs. Of course I keep transferring files to a CD or DVD every now and then so you could say I haven’t really tested the limits of my drive yet. Then today I read a news article that said that hard drive manufacturer is going to introduce a Barracuda hard drive with a capacity of 1.5 Terabytes (TB). That’s 1.5 trillion bytes of data all in one disk. The disk should be available by August.

I must confess the idea of a disk that can hold that much data in it is a little beyond my comprehension at present. I tried to calculate how many movies I could fit at 700 MB a file but came up short. It will definitely be a big number. Still, if I put together my entire multimedia collection, I’m sure it’s close to that number so it’s not that inconceivable in terms of size.

The primary advantage is the expanded storage so no more running to put things on CD because you’re running out of space. At least not for a while. An added benefit of this hard drive is that it will obviously make the lesser capacity models cheaper so if you’re planning to buy a new hard drive, I’d suggest you wait for a month or two.

The biggest disadvantage of such a huge capacity is the sheer amount of data you would lose if your drive crashed. Still, as long as you do regular backups, you should be safe. What I’m curious to know is just what you would do with a 1.5 Terabyte hard drive? Store music, movies, games, software or something else? Let me know.

Tags: hard-drive, seagate, storage

Ultimate Defrag

Martin — Fri, 23 May 2008 07:26:30 +0000

Ultimate Defrag is on first glance yet another defragmentation tool that can analyze the hard drive and defragment it to speed it up. Looking a bit closer however will reveal another feature that has never been before implemented in defragmentation programs: The ability to move the files to other locations on the disk based on the highest possible performance. The outer locations of the hard drive are the faster ones while the inner locations tend to be slower.

When you start Ultimate Defrag for the first time you notice that is is displaying an image of your hard drive in the main pane and information i the left pane. You can select a different hard drive in the left pane or hit the analyze button to analyze the defragmentation level of the hard drive.

Once the hard disk has been analyzed one out of six methods to defragment and optimize the hard disk can be selected from the left pane. This includes the following options:

Fragmented Files Only: Defragments the hard drive, comparable to the classic Windows defragmentation
Consolidate: Places all directories next to each other on the hard drive to reduce seek time
Folder / File Name: Places files and folders on the hard drive based on folder name order
Recency: ideal for data drives. Sorts files and folders according to last access dates, modify dates and file creation dates.
Volatile: A variation of the Recency optimization. Will order folders last modification data and files alphabetically
Auto: The program uses its own optimization algorithm to defrag the hard disk and optimize its performance.

The user can select specific files and folders that should receive the best positions on the hard disk to achieve the best performance possible. This can be for instance the Windows directory, a game, dynamic link libraries or applications. On the other hand files and folders that do not require the best performance can be selected to be placed in the slower sectors of the hard drive. This includes archives, images and backup files.

The help file of Ultimate Defrag is excellent. It gives an explanation of hard disk performance at the beginning, explains all the settings and functions in a non-geeky way and even provides examples of how to optimize computers based on usage, say gaming, office and home.

The Ultimate Defrag Free version is available at Freeware Geeks. I would like to mention that I’m not a lab and I do not have the possibility to check the performance before and after the defragmentation scientifically. My computer is relatively new with not enough files to test the new performance. It does make sense however that this could indeed increase system performance.

Tags: defrag, defragmentation, hard-disk, hard-drive, hd, software, ultimate defrag, Windows

Silencing your hard drives

Martin — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 22:07:09 +0000

I just read an article over at Lifehacker that was called Silence Your Hard Drive with Elastic Suspenders and I thought I weigh in my 2 cents on the topic because I had tried lots of methods to silence the hard drives in my PC. The first thing that people have to understand is that there are two types of noises that hard drives make. The first is their running noise and the second the noise that their vibration is causing.

The article explained how to take care of the vibration but it did not tell that you would still hear the hard drive if it was noisy when reading, writing or seeking. The easiest way to take care of vibrations without paying money at all is to use some foam rubber that is placed beneath the hard drive. I’m using this technique for years with great success. This does not take care of the normal noises of the hard drive though.

The only thing that is really helping here is to either buy hard drives that have very low running noises or silence the hard drive, meaning putting it into a noise reduction case or the complete PC tower. If you do that you need to take care of a problem that is arising: heat. If you put the hard drive in a case that is reducing noises you will notice that it will run at a higher temperature which can lead to data loss and errors over time.

This means that if you silence the hard drive or the PC tower you need to make sure that everything is staying cool inside. Here is what I did. I first bought a hard drive that was making a high pitching sound whenever it was running. This was not endurable at all and I decided to trade it in for a almost silent hard drive which was causing vibration in my PC case. I placed the hard drive on the rubber foam which got rid of that problem.

That’s one reason why I really like the Flash SSD drives. They don’t produce such noises. It will take some time before they become affordable enough but it will be a great relief for everyone who likes silent PCs.

Tags: hard-disk, hard-drive, rubber foam, silence, silent pc

Analyze and Repair PC Hardware

Martin — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:41:17 +0000

I’m the family’s computer guy and it is slowly spreading to family friends and even neighbors as well thanks to recommendations of family members. Recently my mum told my grandmother’s neighbors that I could take a look at their computer which was showing a bluescreen during startup and well, it’s hard to say no to your mother so I took the computer to analyze the problem that was leading to the bluescreen message.

It was an old computer, an AMD Duron 800 Mhz with a 40 Gigabyte hard drive, 256 Megabytes of RAM running Windows XP. The first thing I did was to lookup the Stop error message that was showing when the bluescreen appeared only to find out that it was most likely a hardware related problem.

My guess was that it was either the motherboard, the RAM or the hard drive that were leading to the bluescreen so I had to test them to find the cause for it. Oh, before I started I made sure that every piece of hardware that was not needed to run the computer was disconnected, like sound and network adapters but also secondary drives and onboard components.

The only way to do this was to burn a copy of the Ultimate Boot CD which contains tools to analyze the hardware and boot it. The disc contains all kinds of utilities to scan, analyze and repair hardware connected to a computer and it is especially effective when it comes to RAM and hard drives.

I decided to run Memtest to test the RAM of the computer which turned out to be fine. The next tool was the Drive Fitness Test designed for IBM and Hitachi hard drives. It turned out that the hard drive had damaged sectors which the tool was able to repair.

With the errors corrected I tried to boot into Windows again and it happened to load just fine. If that would not have helped I would have tried some additional tools to test the CPU for instance. I would have used the cloning tool to clone the hard drive and format it completely to start the installation a new.

The Ultimate Boot CD is an excellent utility if you want to test major PC components without having to install software on the computer.

Tags: analyze pc, bootdisk, computer, hard-drive, memory, pc, repair, repair hard drive

FAT32 Format

Martin — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 07:32:39 +0000

Recently I have a need to format some brand new hard drives in …. FAT32 format. Needless to say, Vista doesn’t like to do that. Nor does Windows XP. But since these hard drives will be going into an old security surveillance DVR unit, they need to be in FAT32, not NTFS. I’m also taking this opportunity to upgrade the security unit from the old 30 gig hard drives to new 250 gig units.

I had first thought of using the virtual OS of Windows XP on my PC to format these drives via a USB to ATA connector. And this will work. But as I am not going to be doing this on an on-going basis, I figured I’ll look for something that may be used by people without virtual OS software. And I found one at Fat32 Format.

This fat32format.exe program is small enough for me to store it on a web email account to access anytime I want. And it’s fast and simple to use. Just open a DOS CMD window and type "fat32format x:" where x is the drive to be formatted. Just be careful and never ever type c:

The only downside is this does not perform disk integrity checks. You’ll have to do a chkdsk yourself afterwards. Although this does mean it’s lightning fast in formating. And it’ll format up to 2 Terrabytes in FAT32.

This article has been contributed by Dante. Thanks a lot !

Tags: fat32, formatting, hard-drive, Windows

Free Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8

Martin — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 10:43:27 +0000

Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8 is a sophisticated hard disk partitioning tool for Windows. You can use it to create, merge and edit partitions on your hard drive but also to backup data for instance. Hard Disks can have several partitions that are then accessible through independent drive letters. My first Samsung hard drive with a capacity of 160 Gigabytes is divided into two partitions with the drive letters C and E for instance.

Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8 is a commercial software currently retailing for $49 according to the Paragon website. Computer Active, a British PC magazine ran a promotion last year which was announced to expire on April 11, 2007. Users were able to download a special edition of Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8 and grab a free serial number for it as well.

Jawwad found out that the offer is still valid and that it is still possible to download the special edition and generate a serial number at the Paragon website.

All you need to do to grab a free copy of Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8 is the following:

Download the software from the Computer Active Website
Register it at the Paragon Website

The serial number will be send to the email that you use in the registration process.

Tags: hard-disk, hard-drive, offers, paragon, partition, software, Windows

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