Microsoft uses a special connector to attach the hard drive to the Xbox 360, and you won’t be able to connect it to your PC. At least not right away, because inside that shiny plastic and metal shell, there’s a small hard drive like any other.

Today we’re going to show you how to open up your Xbox 360 hard drive and connect it to your PC, in this step by step, illustrated guide.

Opening Up Your Xbox 360 Hard Drive

To pull this off, you’re going to need

• an Xbox 360 with hard drive (obviously)
• a Windows-enabled PC with at least one S-ATA port
• two special screwdrivers; a TORX T-6 and TORX T-10. These are somewhat different from your usual Philips screwdriver, so you might have to head to the hardware store for them. Without them, you’ll have a hard time reaching the hard drive and might even damage it beyond repair. Caution is strongly advised.

Since you’re working with sensitive electronics, you might want to wear an anti-static wrist strap or surface. Otherwise, by carrying over static electricity, you might short some of the components.

First thing we’ll need to do is open up the protective shell that envelops your Xbox 360 hard drive. Pull it out of your Xbox by pressing the button at the bottom. Turn it upside down, and remove the Microsoft seal.

Be aware that this voids all and any warranty that you have left on your Xbox 360’s hard drive. If it breaks after the procedure, you’ll have to buy a new one.

Don’t worry too much though, the warranty on your Xbox 360 system will remain intact nonetheless.

You’ll notice that there are four visible screws at the bottom, one of which was hidden under the seal. You can remove these with the TORX T-6 screwdriver. After that, the top side should part pretty easily. Don’t pull too hard, just start at the rounded side and pull it open slowly. The square part should give away too, in the end.

To your great horror, you’ll discover four more TORX screws. You can use the T-10 this time. After you’ve removed them, pull away the thin metal cover. Abracadabra. Below you’ll find a 2.5″ hard drive.

After you unplug the cable and try to take it out of its shell, you’ll notice that it only slides until it hits a little plastic button at the far side. To get it out, gently lift up the metal casing, and keep it high while you slide out your hard drive. If you can’t unplug the cable, start sliding the hard drive out first, and gently push the cable out of its socket once you’ve got enough room.

Voila, there you have it. Did you ever imagine your Xbox 360 hard drive would be so… ordinary?

Connecting Your Xbox 360 Hard Drive to Your PC

The Xbox 360 hard drive is a simple 2.5″ S-ATA hard drive, so you would connect it like you would a regular one. Most computers open pretty easily, and you can take the side away with only two screws. You’ll need to attach both a S-ATA cable from your computer’s motherboard to your hard drive, as well as a S-ATA power cable from your computer’s power supply. Both are depicted below.

Alternatively, you can find S-ATA to USB adapters online for ten to twenty bucks. It’ll spare you a lot of trouble, and is safer if you don’t like opening up your computer.

To view the files on your disk, or to make a full back-up, you’ll need to download Xplorer360. It’s an entirely free and easy to use tool. With Xplorer360, you can read and write to Xbox 360 hard drives. By going to Drive -> Backup Image, you can already make a full back-up. Have fun!

I hope you’ve learned something from this tutorial. If you’ve got any other questions, don’t be afraid to ask, there’s a comments section below!

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But for argument’s sake, let’s say you are the Human Resources manager and you have an Excel chart of everyone’s salary – that should not be stored on the network and if the file falls in the wrong hands, the consequences could be severe. But if you were able to hide that drive from prying eyes even if they are able to circumvent your security, you will be safe.

Let us take a look at No Drives Manager, an application you can use to hide drives. You can grab the download from this link on SourceForge directly or from the users page on SourceForge here.

The application does not need to be installed and can be run from a memory stick. What the application does is modify the registry so you don’t have to! Take a look at the GUI.

The interface is very intuitive and easy to use. There are drive letters listed along the top drives A: through Z:. If the drive has been hidden, it will have a check box next to it. Chances are starting out no drives will be selected. You can hit the Hide all drives button to hide all your drives. But more likely you will want to hide a single drive. Let’s see how to do that.

Here is what my Explorer has to say about my current drives on my system:

Let’s say, I want to hide my D: drive aka WhosYourDaddy. I simply check the box next to the letter D. The Binary and decimal settings will be auto-populated and you will not need to mess with them. If you want to use this application to teach yourself how to hide drives manually – you can use this data to do so.

After you choose the drive you want to hide, you have to hit the Write current setting to the registry button. That will tell you that you need to log off and back on to see your changes.

I am logging off to complete my task. OK, I am back and logged back in. Now let us take a look at my Windows Explorer – My Computer again:

I feel like a cheap magician! Wow, look it has disappeared! And with a wave of my magic stick I can make it re-appear. Well, a click of the Run button that is…

This exercise will show you that the drive is hidden but shortcuts and typing in a path or direct file path will take you to where you need to go as you can see below.

Un-doing it is just as easy concealing the drive. Bring the application back up, then uncheck the box next to the drive letter you hid – the D: drive in my case. And write your modifications back to the registry using the Write current setting to the registry button. After you log out and back in again your drive will be magically restored. We have tried doing this with the Windows tool diskpart – but we wound up corrupting data so this is far less risky!

Do you have an easier way of doing this? We would love to hear about it in the comments, come on don’t be shy!

No Drives Manager.

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Do you know where your 200GB is on free space? What’s that? You only have 72MB free? What is using all that lost hard drive space? What do you mean you don’t know?

It looks like you are in need of a virtual canine application called Space Sniffer (Windows only)… Get it? Like a dog.

Umm well, the software is MUCH better than my joke – I assure you. No, really!

Go ahead and grab the download from here. It is a 1.1MB file. Once you get that file downloaded, go ahead and extract the executable file from the zip file. It is called SpaceSniffer.exe and it is completely portable!

Once you get the file out and run it you will see a screen that looks like this:

On that first screen, select the drive you want to analyze or sniff for lost hard drive space. I selected my C:\ drive. And hit Start. That starts the action and you will see a moving representation of your selected drive as it sorts out what is on your drive. You will see something similar to this as it runs:

If you click on any of the drive portions, you can “Zoom In” like so (even while you are still scanning). I double-clicked on the desktop portion occupying 5.4GB of data and saw this:

It is pretty damn cool to see the directories or drives broken down like this. My drive did take some time to complete. In the area of 15 minutes. But I was using the system as I went for normal day to day activities. Then it was complete.

Now let’s take a look at your options. You can see them by hitting Edit – Options. Then, you can see each of the four tabs below:

The first tab denotes if you should show free space, show unknown space, sort item and the minimum size of an element (this is the smallest items), proportions of items against each other and initial detail level. Mess around with them and see what works for you.

Hmm dynamic zoom as a effect? Let’s enable it and see what happens. After enabling this feature it, shows the effect of “Zooming in”. It’s cool but not very useful. It did not use as much memory as I expected.

Scan alternate data steams? This had me stumped so I checked my friend Google and read this:

Just after that I heard about an Alternate Data Stream (ADS) scanner named LADS. When I ran it on one of my drives I was shocked to find that I had over 17,000 hidden objects that ETrust had apparently placed there as part of it’s virus scanning procedure. They’re “Alternate Data Streams”, and one was associated with every file on my NTFS partitions. [http://www.2kevin.net/datastreams.html]

That sparked my interest enough for me to check the box and re-run my scan.

My new scan showed free space but no Alternate Data Streams – but I will scan my servers tonight and let you guys know via the comments how it went later on.

The last option in the preferences is the colors of items placed on your map. Tweak them to your heart’s desire and let us know how it works out in the comments!

Do you use a similar free program to find lost hard drive space? We would love to hear how you keep your hard drives in check! Voice it out in the comments.

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That program is called Hard Drive Power Wash. Let’s check it out.

I started by downloading the free version of Hard Drive Power Wash from here. Using this application, I can schedule the clean up so it can be totally automated. You know set it and forget it.

Once you get this 2.05 MB file you will need to install it. Then you will see a screen that looks like this.

You can either run or analyze everything or hit the menu on the left for your options:

Let’s start running the Analyze process by hitting the analyze button at the bottom of the user interface. That will get the ball rolling. The program advises not to just start the Run process willy nilly because you should see what it is going to delete before it actually does it. It will look for and annihilate the following file types (per their website)

*._tm / *.1st / *.bak / *.nav / *.log / *.$$$ / *.old / *.prv / *.??~ / *.gid / *.tmp / *.syd / *.~* / *.~mp / *~.* / *.bk! / *.bk$ / *.bk4 / *.bk5 / *.bk6 / *.bk7 / *.bk8 / *.bk9 / *.bkp / *.$a / *.$db / *.&&& / *.— / *._dd / *._mp / *.chk / *.xlk / *.db$ / *.diz / *.dmp / *.err / *.ftg / *.fts / *.ilk / *.ncb / *.pch / *.sik / *.temp / chklist.* / mscreate.dir / pspbrwse.jbf / Thumbs.db

The process took some time to run and you will see its progress as it goes like so:

It continued to run for about another 7 minutes and then spat back this report at me:

Wow, I was surprised and impressed in the same breathe. It found a crap-load of files that after clicking through, seemed to be nothing that I needed. Look through each tab and scroll through the files before giving it the OK to kill them. They are all selected by default. You have buttons to select all or none at the bottom of your screen.

You will get your confirmation box alerting you that these files will really be deleted.

Hit Yes and watch as it deletes them. It runs through each segment like log files, images etc. and deletes each file. My internet files took almost 10 minutes to delete on their own. Can you imagine how much crap was in there? When its done you will see a the first screen again now populated with your results. I got rid of a whopping 636 Megabytes!

I am super happy and off to schedule it from the program’s settings:

Do you have a favorite program that will clean a hard drive like Hard Drive Power Wash? We would love to hear about it in the comments!

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The answer, if you’ve read this far, is yes. Yes we can – remove that old hard drive from the laptop or PC. Yes we can – put it in a brand new and extremely cheap dock or simply use a female ATA or SATA connector that plugs in to your regular computer USB port.

I actually know a guy who has a couple of these drives and uses them to back up his computer. Each week he alternates the drive to spread the wear – and because bare drives are quite fragile – he keeps them in those plastic containers used to store food, along with some crumpled sticky notes. They’re actually a great idea because they are airtight, have good thermal and EM(electromagnetic) resistance, while the crumpled sticky notes will absorb a good part of the downward force in the event of an unfortunate drop. Most people would likely just throw away good stuff, but think about it – you’re losing real value as well as stocking the landfills.

First of all, get the hardware in question out of the closet and dust it off with a damp cloth. If it’s a PC, the process is pretty much straightforward. Most PC’s use standard cross-shaped screws to keep the case tight – you don’t need any special tools. Be extra careful about static electricity. I’m not sure of the science behind this – but avoid clothes made out of plastic polymers (such as polyester) as they tend to charge with electrostatic energy. Before handling any internal contents it’s a good idea to touch a bare metal surface.

Once you’re in, unscrew the hard drive from the holder, first on the right and then on the left, while using your other hand to support the weight from underneath. Once it’s free, disconnect the internal connector. Look at it closely in order to see which kind of dock or cable you need to buy.

On laptops, it can be even easier, but usually it’s kind of hard to get to the hard drive (pun intended). The rule of thumb is to search Google for “Laptop Manufacturer” + “Model Number” + “Guide” OR “Manual” OR “Service Manual”. Especially with older models, you might need to painstakingly remove layers of panels and  other components in order to safely remove the hard drive.

Even if you do find the manufacturer’s manual, you should check the MUO guide. Another issue with older drives are the connectors – not all adapters will support those pesky miniaturized ATA or even SATA ports.

Once the patient is safely stored in one of those food containers, it’s time to pull out your credit card and do this search on your favorite tech store: “Connector Type” + “Dock” OR “Adapter” or “Cable” + “USB”. If you live the the US, you’ve got it easy, as Think Geek and Amazon have pretty much got you covered. Less lucky peeps like me would probably opt to order off eBay or annoy the staff at the local computer store.

Once your cable or dock arrives, it’s a simple process of matching the male and female connectors and boom, your old hardware is back to life again. Format it in either NTFS, ext3 or HFS+, depending on your platform of choice and you’re ready to use Time Machine, Back in Time or any other backup solution you might prefer.

Do you recycle your hard drives?   If so, how do you do it?

Photo credits : abdallahh, jeremyfoo, jepoirrier, 少佐

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It may be just an off the cuff percentage, but the fact is that very few of us actually take the pain to backup our data to a safe place. In my opinion, backing up our files and documents ranks right up there with the other best practices of computer usage.

But as is human nature, accumulating files by the dozens is preferred over dodging the tedious job of data backup. Don’t we all put off such jobs for tomorrow?

It is only when Mr. Crash comes calling that we slap our foreheads and realize the value of caution over chance. All the hard work gone in a snafu’s moment. System crashes, hard disk failures and other computer mishaps are more common than we think and there’s a fair probability that one might strike us. When one strikes, we all wish we had a time machine to hop into and undo the moment. We can’t…but some simple software and simpler habits can ‘roll back’ time for us.

One such habit is that of periodic data backups. The tools are of course, the varied backup software.

Idlebackup

Idlebackup (1.17Beta) is a small 633KB zipped download available as an installer and as a standalone executable file.

Idlebackup performs the job of backing up your files in a straightforward manner. Select the directories and files for data backup and point it to the location where the data should be backed up to (an internal or external drive, thumb drive or a network drive).

Here are some of it’s key features.

The ‘Idle’ Job

The first key feature of Idlebackup is in the word ‘idle’. The program’s name comes from its ability to perform automatic data backups when the computer is not in use. When automatic backup is checked, the program does a computer activity check. If no activity is detected, the computer goes into the backup mode following a countdown of 60 seconds. After the backup is made, the interval time starts again.

If a backup job is interrupted, the program waits for the next idle time to resume the task after checking what needs to be copied. The idle activity check can be disabled in favor of a scheduled or a manual backup. The computer can also be configured to shut down when a backup job finishes.

Note: Some CPU usage may interrupt ‘idle’ times… so if you find that idleness isn’t happening, then you could try disabling the CPU activity check feature.

The Three Backup Modes

Idlebackup allows you to backup in any three ways –

Mirror backup: an uncompressed backup mode which is an exact duplicate of the files being backed up. Mirror backups can also be browsed normally (using Windows Explorer or the built in window) as they are uncompressed. After each data backup, Idlebackup erases unused directories (Synchronize backup) and files from selected directories so the directory structure is a replica to that in the source.

Full backup: a compressed backup which is incremental in the manner it adds updates, changed files to the backup zip archive. Also, each directory can be backed up to a separate compressed archive. The zip archives can be configured for integrity checks.

Sequential backup (Version Backup): a compressed backup which creates individual zipped files per backup job marked with a date-timestamp. Older jobs can be set for deletion after few days thus preserving space.

Multiple Backup Profiles

The beta version has introduced the use of 10 different backup settings. Backup settings are nothing but a source destination path for different kinds of backup jobs. For instance, certain files like mp3 can be backed up to one external drive, photos to another…some files get reserved for a network drive. Each backup setting can be given a name thus creating profiles.

Getting it all back – Restore

For backup software, restoring files is just as important as its core function. Idlebackup restores files automatically only for the uncompressed Mirror backup job. The files can be restored to the original location or to a location of choice.  For the compressed backups, a zip program like WinZip or WinRar is required to uncompress the backed up files. With zipped files, all that’s needed is to copy the files from the backup destination to the original path on the hard drive.

What’s there to like?

For a small, simple freeware, the feature set is full of potential. The program is easy enough for a novice user with its fast install and configuration. The program follows certain rules with regards to naming which also become safety nets against overwriting while repairing files through a restore. With a few profile settings, backup jobs can be set for mail clients too (see usage examples). The memory footprint is not significant (about 6K in my test runs).

The new Idlebackup beta so far seems a significant step up from its earlier avatar (ver1.16), with a more flexible set of features.

Are you willing to turn over a new leaf with the backup habit using this freeware? If you are an old hand at data backup tools, give us a heads-up on this simple one.

Idlebackup is a backup solution for Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7.

Image Credit: Sumobackup

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My own story began with the failure of the back up drive, which was the legacy of my old PC days. I figured I could survive several days without backing up my data before buying a replacement drive. Well, days turned to weeks and months turned to years, then my main hard drive finally failed. Then I remembered, “Ah, yes… I have to buy that second hard drive to back up my data.”

But the common condition of not backing up is because most people don’t want to go through the tedious process of constant “choose and copy and paste”. We need help from free back up utilities, and the first requirement is the ability to automate the whole process.

Travel Through Time

Starting from Leopard, Mac OS X comes with its own “set it and forget it” back up utilities called Time Machine. Over its lifespan, this application has been refined into a very capable utility and should be the first option of back up tools for common Mac users.

Activating it requires no rocket science. Just go to the System Preferences and click on Time Machine.

Users need to plug in the external drive, select it as the destination drive, and switch the Time Machine on – literally.

However, Time Machine can’t work with MS-DOS (FAT) formatted drives. So, if you want the external drive to also be available for Windows machines, you can’t do time travel.

Other disadvantages of using Time Machine are:

• The backup can’t be used to boot the machine
• Users can’t control when the process should take place
• Since this tool will record the state of the main drive all the time, it will (eventually) take up a very large space.

Attack Of The Clone

Another alternative is the free backup utility Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC). I’ve tried the latest stable version (v. 3.2.1) and it works well under the new Mac OS X v 10.6.

However, the developer suggests that Snow Leopard users should upgrade their copy with the newer beta version (v. 3.3.b5 at the time of writing). You can do this by downloading it directly from the developer’s site or by using the “Update CCC” menu directly from the app.

As the name suggests, this free backup utility will create a clone of your disk. By default, CCC will back up everything from the main disk to the chosen destination. But this setting can be changed easily by choosing “Cloning Options”

If you choose “Incremental backup…“, you will be able to select which items should be excluded from the backup process by unchecking them. Give a check mark to the option “Delete items…” if you want to create the exact copy of your main drive, but if you only want to do a one-way backup, leave this option alone.

For the target disk; you can choose either an external disk, a new disk image, an already available disk image, or even a disk in a remote location.

The advantage of using a disk image as the target disk is that you can use non HFS+ formatted disks as the image location. It’s also possible to place the image on the main drive. The only disadvantage to this option is that you can’t boot from a disk image.

After everything is set, you can push that “Clone” button on the bottom-right corner of the windows.

The cloning process can also be scheduled easily through the “Scheduled Task…” menu (or by using the shortcut key Command + S)

Return Of The Clone

In these data cloning rituals, there’s another process as important as the backing up: restoring the data. This process should also be as painless as possible.

Fortunately, CCC makes the data restoration process as simple as switching the source – target disk. Too easy to be true, huh?

So do you back up your data regularly? Do you know of any other free alternatives for backing up a Mac? Share your thoughts using the comments below.

Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC)

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But did you ever think about how it actually gets stored?

If you were to stack the equivalent capacity of CDs in front of you it would surely rise to eye-level. You can fit everything on those CDs onto that hard drive. Truly amazing for an invention that has its origins in the 1950’s and was first developed as a humble cassette tape.

How Does a Hard Drive Work – The Basics

In order to fully understand a hard drive you have to know how one works physically. Basically, there are discs, one on top of the other spaced a few millimetres apart. These discs are called platters. Polished to a high mirror shine and incredibly smooth they can hold vast amounts of data.

Next we have the arm. This writes and reads data onto the disc. It stretches out over the platter and moves over it from centre to edge reading and writing data to the platter through its tiny heads which hover just over the platter. The arm, on the average domestic drives can oscillate around 50 times per second. On many high-spec machines and those used for complex calculations this figure can rise into the thousands.

Hard drives use magnetism to store information just like on old cassette tapes. For that reason, copper heads are used as they are easy to magnetise and demagnetise using electricity.

Storage and Operation

When you save a file, the ‘write’ head on the arm writes the data onto the platter as it spins at high RPM often in the region of 4,000. However, it doesn’t just go anywhere as the computer must be able to locate the file later. It also must not interfere or indeed delete any other information already on the drive.

For this reason, platters are separated into different sectors and tracks. The tracks are the long circular divisions highlighted here in yellow. They are like ‘tracks’ on music records. Then we have the different sectors which are small sections of tracks. There are thousands of these from centre to edge of the platter. One is highlighted blue in the picture.

In Operation

When you open a file, program or really anything on your PC, the hard drive must find it. So let’s say that you open an image. The CPU will tell the hard drive what you’re looking for. The hard drive will spin extremely fast and it will find the image in a nano-second. It will then ‘read’ the image and send it to the CPU. The time it takes to do this is called the ‘read time’. Then the CPU takes over and sends the image on its way to your screen.

Let’s say you edited the image. Well now those changes must be saved. When you click ‘Save’, all of that information is shot to the CPU which in turn sorts it (processes it) and sends it to the hard drive for storage. The hard drive will spin up and the arm will use its ‘write’ heads to overwrite the previous image with the new one. Job done.

That is what that buzzing disc in your computer gets up to all day. Now, as I do with most of my articles here on MUO I shall leave you with a friendly word of advice:

If you want to look inside to further understand how does hard drive work, do so with an old one. There are a few reasons for this.

• Remember when you were a kid and you pulled apart that roll of film with all aunt Lucy’s wedding snaps on it? Well exposing a hard drive to light will damage it and render it as useless as that roll of film.
• Once you pop open that drive, plugs on the screws will snap to tell the manufacturer you have been poking around in there. By doing this, your warranty is void immediately. Many drives actually have this warning printed on the side.
• They’re expensive and carry a lot of important info so don’t just pop open the family PC to have a go at it. Pick up an old one on eBay.

Share your thoughts in comments!

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Fear not. You may be able to learn how to get data off a dead hard drive, all by yourself. Now a word of warning, if the hard drive has already physically failed and the disks in it won’t spin, then there isn’t much you can do but contact a data recovery specialist. I suppose you could order an identical hard drive via eBay and carefully take the platters out and put them into the new hard drive. However, if you are that technically inclined, this article is way beneath you!

If you get a BSOD  then something may have happened to make your hard drive not boot, or start the operating system. This could be because of a faulty hard drive driver (the software that tells the computer how to use the hard drive) or it could be because of a loose connection. If you feel adventurous, you could check to make sure the connection is good inside the computer.

With some luck, that won’t be the case. If your computer continues on to give you some start up options in white text on a black screen, try choosing Last Known Good Configuration. That will start the computer into a backed-up version of Windows when life was good. It may be missing some recently added files and settings, but at least you’ll get the majority of your work back. At this point, it would be a good idea to perform a ScanDisk or CheckDisk task.

Your computer doesn’t take you to the start-up options page? Hmmm. Well, what you can do is try booting your computer from the Windows disk that came with your computer. Hopefully you have that still.

You may need to go into your BIOS settings and change the start-up disk setting to CD-ROM Drive.

Once your computer boots into the Windows disk,you’ll have some options. One of them will be the Recovery Console. Choose that by pressing the R key.

Chances are you only have one installation of Windows on your computer, so that’s the installation you’ll choose to work with.

When asked for your Administrator’s password, enter it and continue. If you didn’t set up an Administrator’s password, just hit enter to continue.

Now, you’ll be presented with a black screen with white text. At the prompt, type chkdsk /r. What this does is run the Check Disk utility on the hard drive and repairs any problems it might find. If this does the trick, your computer will reboot and work fine. Note, however, that now would be a VERY good time to make a back up of your hard drive and look into buying a new one. If this happens again, you’ll be very lucky to recover it once more.

If that doesn’t work, boot into the Recovery console again. There are two other commands you may want to try: Fixboot,which rewrites the startup sector on your hard drive, and Fixmbr, which repairs the Master Boot Record.

Those are pretty advanced commands to use, so you may not want to run them. Run at your own risk, is all I can say.

There is also a device you can buy, which is pretty inexpensive, that allows you take your hard drive, connect it to this device, and then plug it into the USB port of another computer.This does require you to remove your hard drive from its current computer.

What happens is that the computer you plugged it into, treats it as a slave drive. That means that it doesn’t need to access the operating system, so you should be able to transfer over your files from the failing hard drive. The defunct hard drive shows up as an external USB drive in Window’s Explorer so you can simply drag and drop from it.

I have used one of these many times. What I have found is that as long as the platters spin, I’m able to recover the data.

Do you know of any other simple ways how to get data off a dead hard drive? Know of any good freeware? Has this article helped you? Help your Internet friends out and let us know about it in the comments.

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So what should you do to ensure that the files were “really gone” and could never be retrieved. For starters, never say never! As long as you don’t dismantle and physically destroy the hard disk, your files can be retrieved (and you thought recovering files after an OS install was impossible). That being said, chances are you won’t have to worry about forensic experts trying to get super secret formula X from your computer.

With a little care, you can be pretty sure you would be able to dodge the attempts of your overly geeky friend. Here’s how.

Format, don’t just “quick format”

First off, when the operating system is running, you cannot be sure if any files are actually deleted. At the very least, you have to format your hard drive. So when you decide to do so, don’t save time by doing a “Quick Format” – it doesn’t delete files, use the other option and perform a complete format which will erase your hard disk completely.

You can achieve this by booting from Windows disc and choosing the appropriate option. Linux users can boot from one of the live CDs and use the fdisk utility to format the hard disk

This should take care of any fears of data recovery by novice users

Securely delete the files

You can step it up a notch by securely deleting files from the hard disk. A secure delete not only deletes the files, but writes random data onto your hard disk as well, making it extremely (I mean EXTREMELY) difficult to get the files back.

If you are erasing your hard disk completely, you can use Darik’s Boot and Nuke, securely deleting data is the sole purpose of existence of this bad boy. Boot DBAN and let it do what it does best.

If on the other hand you want to securely delete files from a USB stick or external hard drive you can try previously mentioned and very useful Eraser. It integrates with Windows shell and lets you perform secure deletes from the context menu.

These methods would pretty much have you covered, but be warned: an adept professional may still be able to retrieve files although these methods would still give him a pretty tough time.

Do you know of better software or tips that you use for similar purposes? Mention them in the comments and share with the world!

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While installing the operating system, the installer takes care of writing appropriately to the first 512 bytes to allow the operating system to boot and detect partitions. Once that has been done, you do not have direct access to the MBR (which is generally not recommended). However, there are times when you need to take things in your own hand (like backing up MBR before restoring a hard disk image or an OS install, making a partition bootable, or recovering from a corrupt MBR etc), for such times there is a small utility you can use, called – MBRWizard.

MBRWizard allows you to save/restore MBR, fix a corrupt MBR, you can hide/unhide hard disk partitions, make a partition bootable or delete it all together, make a flash disk bootable etc.

MBRWizard is a command line utility you can download from here. Fire up Command Prompt and browse to where you have MBRWiz.exe stored (or else add the directory to your PATH variable), type MBRWiz and you will see a list of all the options. You can then decide which option to choose according to what you are trying to accomplish.

Here are a few examples.

To create a backup of MBR

MBRWiz /save=C:\savedMBR

You can then use this backup copy to restore MBR in case you ever have to.

To restore MBR from the saved file

MBRWiz /Restore=C:\savedMBR

To see an exhaustive list of all the partitions along with attributes

MBRWiz /List

To Hide a parition use

MBRWiz /Hide=Yes /Disk=0 /Part=2

To delete a partition

MBRWiz /Part=2 Del

You can find the complete documentation of all the options and how to use them, here. The site also lists how you can troubleshoot MBR problems when you cannot boot into the operating system. Although in such situations, you must have a way to boot from a CD, USB drive or (ahem..) floppy disk and be able to run MBRWizard. Check out how to make your own Windows Live CD, MBRWizard would be a nice utility to have on your live CD.

MBRWizard is a great tool to have everything is working fine, as well as when you need to fix MBR issues. You must have your favorite tools to jumpstart a problematic computer. We would love to hear about them so tell us in the comments.

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I went to this link http://www.paragon-software.com/registration/td2009.html to grab my copy. They ask you to register and provide an email address where you can receive your license information. For those of you who still do not like giving out their email address we have covered plenty of self destructing email addresses which you can find here and here.

You can start your download before you get the email so you will be ready to go when the information arrives. You have to log into http://kb.paragon-software.com/ess with the information in the email. The trial download does not allow you to register it with this information.

My email came pretty quickly it looked like this:

Thank you for your interest in Paragon Total Defrag 2009 Special Edition!
The product is registered with:
PRODUCT KEY / USER NAME: PRODUCT KEY DELETED
SERIAL NUMBER: SERIAL NUMBER DELETED
Additional information about this software can be found in Paragon’s Knowledge Base available at http://kb.paragon-software.com

With that product key and serial number I was able to download and install the software. It is a 17.5 MB installer that came in very quickly. You are downloading the trial version and then you will input your registration information. Make sure the following window does not say ‘TRIAL’.

When the install is complete you will see an image of your first drive like so:

Let’s take a quick look at the minimal settings:

We should leave it on Safe Mode even though it will take longer to run to completion – there is little to no chance you will mess up your Windows install in safe mode. You have options from the menu to Check File System Integrity. It requires exclusive access to your file system and will ask for a reboot.

This is a beefed up version of scandisk. Total Defrag can do a volume surface test as well in ether normal or extreme mode.

Analyzing your partition will give you information about your fragmentation like so:

And finally what we have all been waiting for the defragmentation…Click on Partition – Defragment – Defragment Partition to get the ball rolling.

You will have the above options for your defragment… Nice! I love having options . Set your options and click Yes. The defragmenting will take off. A warning will pop up telling you that you should back up your data before you begin. I would say that you should ALWAYS have a backup of your files.

Feel free to back up first and then click Yes. If Total Defrag sees problems with the volume you will get a message telling you to use ChkDisk first…

In this case I would run the File System Integrity Checker and have it fix the errors. When Total Defrag is complete your drive should be mostly green like this:

Stay tuned for more reviews on the now free Paragon suite! What do you use for defragmenting? Do you have a favorite free tool? Share it with us in the comments!

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Yes I am so old school I remember when it was called The Partition Magician and it was owned by PowerQuest and NOT Symantec who acquired them in 2003.

But any which way PartitionMagic does a great job at pretty much anything Partition related.

Long story short – PartitionMagic, even though it is not still being developed or improved, will cost you around $50 for a legitimate copy.

Yes people do pay for software when they have no other options – but, today I found a little known application (little known to me at least!) called EASEUS Partition Manager 3.0 Home Edition. The free alternative to PartitionMagic will do all the good stuff PartitionMagic did for me, so what’s the catch? It is only free FOR HOME USERS and 32 Bit Operating Systems. Fair enough. Let’s take her for a test drive.

I have a NTFS IDE hard drive sitting on my desk with some old data on it. I believe it is a 80GB drive. Let’s see how hard it will be to split that into two drives without putting the kibosh on my data.

I started by downloading the installer file from Download.com here. It is a 7.9MB zip file. The zip file has one exe file in it that is slightly larger. I ran it, plugged my hard drive into an IDE-USB enclosure for the test and got down to business…

I chose the partition I want to resize and I right-clicked on it. It gave me this context menu.

I chose Resize and I got the screen below. I have not had issues with resizing or moving partitions back in the day but you SHOULD ALWAYS BACKUP before starting any operation that messes with your file structure. So if you haven’t backed up yet… Do it now!

On the next screen you tell the partition resizer how much space you want after you are complete. Then you simply click OK and let it rock and roll.

Now as you can see by the new notification in the lower left hand corner, it says there is one operation pending. Now you need to click ‘apply’ to start it off.

Then another confirmation box will pop up asking you if you are ready to do this now…

Then for most of the resizing/moving partition options Windows will need to reboot to finish its process. Make sure you don’t have any open files and you are ready to continue.

That is it and you are on your way to having another partition created without erasing your disk or dropping some serious duckets.

When your machine comes back up you are golden! Do you have another FREE partition magic-like program you use? If so share it with us….in the comments boys and girls!

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The internal hard disks available in the market, on the other hand, require to be prepared before use. By preparing a hard drive, I mean that the hard drive needs to be formatted. And no, it isn’t as tough as it sounds.

So, how do you format a nwe internal hard drive and make the hard drive useable by your operating system? The answer depends on which operating system you are using. I use both Windows XP and Linux for my work and I will be explaining the steps needed to format new disks under both these operating systems.

Of course, I’m assuming that you have already attached your disk to your computer and the computer is able to boot up with the older hard disk.

So, once you’ve logged into the administrator account under Windows XP, what you need to do is right click on the “My computer” icon and click on Manage.

This should open the Computer Management tool. Now to view the newly attached disk go to the Disk Management service.

As soon as you click on disk management, a wizard should pop up which will help you to initialize your new disk. At this point, you can just let the wizard do its job and when its done, you should be able to see your new disk in an unallocated state.This does not mean that the disk is bad, but it means that you have successfuly completed the first part of the process and can proceed to the second part.

This is where you need to create a partition, and give your new disk a drive name, like c:, d: etc, so that you can use it under Windows.

The new partition wizard will take you through a series of steps and let you specify the size of the partition (if you don’t want the whole disk to be allocated to a single drive), the drive letter and the file system type. In almost all cases, you can simply chose the default options and let the wizard work its magic.

In the end, you should have a shiny new drive available for storing your MP3 collection important documents.

In case you are using Linux then the process is a little more involved. I’m assuming that you are familiar with the Linux command prompt as most of these steps have to be performed on the command prompt. So, login as root and fire up the command prompt application before starting.

You will have to first use the fdisk command to find the name of the newly attached drive and then use the same command to create a partition on the disk.

As you can see, the “fdisk -l” command lists two drives attached to the system, /dev/sda and /dev/sdb.

The /dev/sda drive has a Linux partition and is your main operating system drive. So, the newly attached drive is /dev/sdb and it doesn’t have any partitions on it, yet. To create a new partition on the drive, use the interactive form of the fdisk command.

[root@localhost ~]# fdisk /dev/sdb
Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun, SGI or OSF disklabel
Building a new DOS disklabel. Changes will remain in memory only,
until you decide to write them. After that, of course, the previous
content won’t be recoverable.

Warning: invalid flag 0×0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by w(rite)

Command (m for help): n
Command action
e   extended
p   primary partition (1-4)
p
Partition number (1-4): 1
First cylinder (1-100, default 1):
Using default value 1
Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (1-100, default 100):
Using default value 100

Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered!

Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
Syncing disks.
[root@localhost ~]#

Now, to format this partition, use the mkfs command on partition number 1 of /dev/sdb that we created above.

mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdb1

That should be enough to make the new drive visible to your operating system and you should be able to mount and use the drive.

mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb /mount_point

So, as you you don’t have to be a computer genuis to format an internal hard drive. It is not as complicated as it sounds and you all can do it. If you guys have any more questions, please let us know in the comments and we’ll be glad to help.

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When I shop for hard disk, I tend to buy one that comes with a large storage space so that I can have ample space to store all my video and music files and to install (and test out) all sort of applications to my system. However, one thing that I found is that no matter how big my hard disk is, it will get depleted very fast. If you are just like me, then it’s time for you to get familiar with some disk usage analyzers to view disk usage on Linux and see what you have been storing on your hard disk. Then you can get it removed to retrieve the storage space.

Below are some of the ways and tools to view disk usage on Linux.

Command line

If you are geeky enough, the easiest and fastest way is to use the ‘df’ command in your terminal. Simply type

df -h

in the terminal and it will show the disk usage percentage of your hard disk.

As can be seen from the screenshot above, this can only serve as a quick way to find out the amount of disk space available. It is definitely not the best mean to analyze  your storage pattern.

Baobab (Disk Usage Analyzer)

Most Linux distros with Gnome desktop (especially Ubuntu) use Baobab, also known as Disk Usage Analyzer, as the default disk usage viewer application. This is a great application that can break down and analyze your storage pattern to the last folder. You can define the folders that you want to scan and get it to return a circular rings chart representation of the space taken up by each files.

KDirStat and GdMap

If you have used WinDirStat on your Windows, you will agree that it is an useful application that can help you analyze and reclaim your disk space. What many people don’t know is that WinDirStat is actually a clone of the KDirStat. KDirStat has the same functionality as WinDirStat (or maybe the other way round), except that it is meant for the Linux desktop. While it is initially designed for KDE desktop, it is also compatible with any X11 desktop system.

KDirStat displays your folders/files in term of rectangular chunk. The biggest the filesize, the bigger is the chunk. This allows you to have a quick view of your filesystem and easily identify which folders/files is taking up a big chunk of space in the hard disk.

Gd Map is the KDirStat equivalent in Gnome desktop, except that it does not display the folder structure above the treemap and does not allows you to clean up the hard disk.

Filelight

Like Baobab, Filelight creates an interactive map of concentric, segmented rings that help visualize disk usage on your computer. You can easily zoom in to any folders by clicking on the respective segment on the rings.

Philesight

Philesight is a Web-based implementation of Filelight and can be used on a remote server without graphical user interface. Philesight uses a command line program to generate the PNG files on your browser and a wrapper CGI script to allow navigating through the filesystem. One of its distinct feature is the colorful rainbow concentric rings that makes it pleasant to look at.

xdiskusage

xdiskusage is a tiny program that displays your filesystem hierarchy from left to right with a rectangular shape of size respective to its file size. If you are scanning your Home folder, The left most rectangular box will represent the Home folder while the subsequent boxes to the right represent the next folders down the Home directory. You can easily zoom in/out of any folders (or rectangular box) by double-clicking on that box.

What is the software that you used to analyze and view the disk usage pattern on your Linux desktop?

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The majority of both business and home PCs are typically either thrown out with the everyday trash, or turned over to one of the few electronics recycling warehouses in your area. These warehouses usually require some type of fee for disposal as well. Until we get some type of environmentally friendly method for computer recycling, I am going to recommend trying your own way. Such as adding that much needed storage to your home or work network. The simplest and cheapest method for doing this is using the open source FreeNAS. With this software you can convert old PC to NAS (Network Attached Storage).

FreeNas is an open source NAS (Network Attached Storage) operating system. FreeNAS does this with simply 32MB of data on a USB flash drive, hard drive or live boot CD. All of the configuration runs in a easy to use web interface and supports a wide range of protocols, including CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, AFP, RSYNC and iSCSI. It supports both IDE and SATA drives. It also includes software based RAID (0,1,5), allowing you protection on failed drives.

After you have completed downloading the latest FreeNAS ISO image or LiveCD, you simply take your old, but still running PC and boot-up to install the image or simply run it from the Live CD, if that’s what you would prefer. Like I said before, you may also install this onto a compact flash or USB drive as well.

Once installed, you have a large plethora of options to choose from. Even including the ability for Active Directory integration into your Windows based business network.

The FreeNAS project has been around for a little while, so they already have a pretty good base of users, who can help you out on a moment’s notice. Their website is very easy to navigate, and there is plenty of documentation, and even a wiki on Novell’s site.

So if you have an old PC laying around and you want to convert that PC to network storage, it can’t hurt to download and burn the LiveCD of FreeNAS. Once you get it up and running, your options are limitless. Use it as a multimedia storage device, an FTP server or even as an alternative backup location.

Have any of you used FreeNAS before? Do you have any other suggestions for free Network Attached Storage?

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The standard IDE/SATA hard drive today is still the most mechanical piece of equipment sitting in your present day PC. And this will continue to be the case until solid state drives become much cheaper and much more compatible for present day hardware. The most unfortunate part of the problems with these drives, is how incredibly critical they are to the state of your computer. A hard disk failure means a dead computer – unless you are lucky enough to be running in some type of RAID environment, which most home users won’t be.

To help predict and protect yourself from these the inevitable circumstances of a hard drive failure, I have come up with four third party diagnostic tools, and a list of the all the major hard drive manufacturer tools. Most of these incorporate the built-in SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) feature with most of today’s hard disks. (Windows Only)

CrystalDiskInfo

CrystalDiskInfo is a S.M.A.R.T. based utility that supports not only internal drives, but both USB and IEEE1394’s as well. It displays an incredible amount of simple and advanced disk information, and may always be running in the background. This includes temperature readings, read/write errors and power management tools, running at all times of the day.

General Information on your drive.

Advanced Diagnostic of your drive.

HD Tune

HD Tune is a much simpler hard drive disk scanning utility that has benchmarking, advanced diagnostics, similar to Crystal and a disk scanning utility, very similar to the Windows version, but can be run in real-time. It also includes real-time temperature monitoring.

HD Tune also uses the SMART based technology and has already been a help to myself. I knew that my hard drive was on the brink, and this was the first utility to confirm that. You’ll see my errors below. I wasn’t even able to run the benchmarking tool on my system drive. The screen shot below is for my data drive. It also supports all connection types.

Benchmarking

Disk Scanning

HDD Health

HDD Health is another similar product that can help you predict and prvene hard disk failure. It includes temperature and real-time monitoring, but includes a health indicator, simply by percentage and nothing more. It does include the same advanced diagnostic tools as the other SMART utilities as well.

General Information

Extended Drive Information

HDD Scan

HDD Scan not only includes many SMART diagnostic utilities, but other disk utilities as well. It includes many advanced testing modes, such as reading, writing and erasing in linear. In comparison to the other products, HDD Scan might get you more bang for the free buck.

Various HDD Scan Tools

Available Surface Tests

Manufacturer Specific Products

Some people might trust products designated for their specific hard drive more then any other. So I’ve provided a list of all the major manufacturers with a link to their diagnostic tools. A few of these may even support different manufacturers.

Fujitsu – Supports all forms of internal connection and is capable of doing in depth surface and diagnostic testing.

Hitachi – Several diagnostic tools for Hitachi drives. Analyze, optimize and protect your drive from failure.

Samsung – The Samsung utility will only work with Samsung drives and is an offline bootable disk that can be run no matter what the state of your drive.

Seagate/Maxtor – The Seagate tools, also known as Seatools, are Windows specific tools that can quickly and comprehensively determine the state of your present Seagate or Maxtor hard drive.

Western Digital – In order to determine your appropriate tools, you’ll first have to select your specific product and browse to a compatible ‘Data Lifeguard Diagnostic Tools’. Thorough test and repair utilities for West Digital drives.

All of the tools above may or may not be able to resolve serious disk errors on your drive. But if you are worrisome about the state of your current HDD and you’d like to confirm it, these tools will help to do so. It will force you to clone your hard drive or backing up your data on a regular basis before the inevitable happens. Play with each of tools, and find the best that suits your situation.

The above third party tools are a few of the popular free utilities I’ve found. Do you have another suggestion for protection? If you’ve tried any of the above, get back to us with your favorite.

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The first thing I check on a slow computer is if it is running in PIO or DMA mode.

I hear you panic, “What the doodle is DMA mode? How do I check that? Oh Guy, don’t get too techy on us!!!”

Don’t sweat it. This procedure only takes about 3 minutes and is quick and painless. That’s why I check this first instead of running all the diagnostic and hard drive utilities. Plus, if this IS the problem, those utilities will take FOREVER to run and won’t solve the problem.

What Happened?

How does a Windows-based machine drop from the Direct Memory Access (DMA) modes (fast modes) to the Programmed Input/Output (PIO) mode (death warmed over)? Apparently, if Windows encounters six or more CRC or timeout errors, it will have a “hard drive attack” and slow the Secondary IDE settings to PIO mode.

Simply shutting down your computer by the power button can lead to this problem too. So, don’t do that anymore.

(NOTE: Hardware Engineer Types, I know this isn’t the most accurate explanation, but it’s the very basic overview that my Aunt Tessie can handle, OK?)

How Can I Fix It?

Now for the juicy part – how to fix it. You might have gathered that from the heading above. Good eye.

Go to the Device Manager (accessible via the Windows Control Panel, double-click the Systems Icon, click the Hardware tab, then the Device Manager button)

Expand the IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers entry.

Double-click on the first IDE Channel entry. This is where the problem seems to occur the most. If you don’t find it here, then check the other entries with the same method.

Click on the Advanced Settings tab and see if the Current Transfer Mode reads PIO Mode and the Transfer Mode reads DMA if available.

If it does, then set the Transfer Mode to PIO only. Click ‘OK’.

Double-click on the first IDE Channel entry again, click on the Advanced Settings tab, and change the Transfer Mode from PIO only to DMA if available. Click ‘OK’.

Once more, double-click on the first IDE Channel entry and click on the Advanced Settings tab. Now the Current Transfer Mode should read something like Ultra DMA Mode 5. Click ‘OK’, restart your computer and see how it runs so much faster. Quick and painless, n’est pas?

Wait, you’re still here? It happened again? You’ve been shutting down properly right? I see.

Well, there are some other possible contributing factors that can cause the hard drive to drop to PIO mode. At this point though, you may be best to take it to a qualified repair shop. Most of these problems will be hardware related. At least you didn’t waste 17.25 hours waiting for a defrag that wasn’t going to fix anything.

Have you had this problem before? Know of any other simple changes that can be made in the Device Manager that can help your computer? Let us know in the comments.

Picture Credit : Jaisey

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But then again it’s a delight to work on a freshly installed machine, where everything is smooth and responds quickly. But customization is tedious. And when your hard drive decides to break spontaneously, time is something you won’t have for sure.

For emergencies it’s better you have a data and a system backup available. Here are the 5 best tools to clone or copy your hard drive in no particular order.

Paragon’s Drive Backup Express (Windows)

This software is the easy solution to clone your hard drive . It’s comfortable to use with a sleek interface that guides you through the whole process of backing up and restoring step by step. And while a backup is running in the background you can even proceed using your system.

Both Drive Backup Express and DriveImage XML (described below) require a bootable CD, which the user has to create independently.

I have previously written about Drive Backup Express and thoroughly explained how it works here.

DriveImage XML (Windows)

In contrast to Drive Backup Express, DriveImage XML is a visually very basic tool. However, it reliably creates images of logical drives and partitions and restores these to either the originating or a different hard disk.

Like Drive Backup Express, DriveImage XML applies a cloning technique that allows parallel use of the system while the backup is running. It can also do incremental backups, supplementing existing backups with what was changed in the meantime. Additionally, images can be restored without having to reboot.

CloneZilla (cross platform)

CloneZilla is an open source and cross platform tool to make a copy of a hard drive and also to restore them afterwards.

It’s a tough tool for non nerds as it requires some background knowledge. First of all it’s not a software you install on your computer. You download CloneZilla in form of an ISO image or ZIP file and burn the image to a CD or load the files onto a USB flash drive or hard drive.

The next step is to reboot the computer from that medium you created, which may require going into the BIOS and allow booting from a CD or USB device.

Once the tool is running, it’s easy to use the simple interface to initiate or restore a backup. There also is sort of a screenshot walkthrough on the CloneZilla homepage, where you can view some of the options before running the tool.

XXCLONE (Windows)

XXCLONE is Windows software. The tool can create a self-bootable clone of a Windows drive as well as full backups of non-system volumes. Basically, it can make a hard drive image.

The interface is basic and clear. When started, the tool scans for available volumes and you can then choose a source and target volume from these. A direct link to the Windows Disk Management is provided through the “diskmgmt” button. Under the “Tool Cools” tab you can make use of options such as making the target volume self-bootable, manage restore points or create a batch file to save your current settings for future re-use.

The download section of the website provides a thorough help file that contains screenshots and descriptions of all features.

EASEUS Disk Copy (cross platform)

EASEUS Disk Copy creates sector by sector clones of partitions or hard disks, independent of operating system, file systems or partition scheme. It’s a versatile tool for both the novice and experienced user.

Just like CoolZilla, it’s not installed locally, rather the ISO image is burned to a bootable CD or DVD.

The website is probably the best of all tools described here. The information is thorough and very clear, including a very detailed help section that will walk you through every aspect of the program.

Do you clone and copy your hard drive? If so, which program do you use? Can you recommend any particular program to us? Let us know in the comments.

Picture credits: CraigPJ

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