Wednesday, August 17, 2011
PART 2 - Hard Drive Maintenance: fix a slow drive(and how some drives just cant be saved)
DISCLAIMER:
Resurfacing, Low level formatting and slow sector erasure will destroy any data on the drive, this guide assumes you have backups and are trying to reshape a slow drive, and even after doing all that is possible , some drives will still show signs of slowness and bad sectors due to uncorrectable physical damage to the surface, heads and/or arms. Always Verify Data Integrity before using a resurfaced drive!
Welcome Back today we take a look at some other awesome programs!
VICTORIA - quick bad sector removal/destructive slow sector erases
http://hdd-911.com/
A program created on the motherland, Victoria comes as a dos solution to access drives directly for health and sector checkup, there is also a newer (4+) windows version that only runs on Windows XP, the program contains:
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Hard Drive Maintenance: how to fix a slow hard drive(and bad sectors)PART 1
DISCLAIMER
As i previously mentioned, hard drives are prone to mechanical wear, and break down, when a drive fails it will be unable to spin up, move the heads in place, and make loud grinding scratchy noises and clicks, all signs of a dead or dying drive, and only hard drive forensics can help you in such case, this is not a guide to revive dead hard drives. This guide assumes you have full backups of your data.
DEFRAG VS REPAIRING SLOW/BAD SECTORS
In our daily computer use, we want our data written onto our hard drive in a single line, so that later its read in the same speedy fashion, the reality is that in order to provide read/write performance, big data files are laid and fragmented all over the hard drive, leading to a certain degree of delay when we request the file again. A hard drive Defrag will move big files in sequential order to prevent such delays, this does NOT fix slow or damaged sectors.
As i previously mentioned, hard drives are prone to mechanical wear, and break down, when a drive fails it will be unable to spin up, move the heads in place, and make loud grinding scratchy noises and clicks, all signs of a dead or dying drive, and only hard drive forensics can help you in such case, this is not a guide to revive dead hard drives. This guide assumes you have full backups of your data.
DEFRAG VS REPAIRING SLOW/BAD SECTORS
In our daily computer use, we want our data written onto our hard drive in a single line, so that later its read in the same speedy fashion, the reality is that in order to provide read/write performance, big data files are laid and fragmented all over the hard drive, leading to a certain degree of delay when we request the file again. A hard drive Defrag will move big files in sequential order to prevent such delays, this does NOT fix slow or damaged sectors.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
How to double the speed of your computer (RAID 0 + CLONE BACKUP)
We want fast computers! we want to press the start button and have our operating systems desktop in our screen within seconds, click on our folders and enjoy our music, pictures or home movies, open up our browser and visit our favorites!
But why do we have to wait for 40 seconds for our systems to be ready?, why does our system grind to a halt on the loading screen as if it was calculating quantum equations in the background, we invest a few hundred dollars in 4 or 8 cores, 8 gigs of the fastest ram, and still we have to wait for our HARD DRIVES to catch up to speed?
THE PROBLEM
But why do we have to wait for 40 seconds for our systems to be ready?, why does our system grind to a halt on the loading screen as if it was calculating quantum equations in the background, we invest a few hundred dollars in 4 or 8 cores, 8 gigs of the fastest ram, and still we have to wait for our HARD DRIVES to catch up to speed?
THE PROBLEM
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
How to install Windows 7 from USB (any version too!! in 4 easy steps)
oh hi! nice to see you again :3 (revisited december 27 2011 small detail)
Have you ever had the need to install windows 7 onto your computer only to find the dvd drive is dead, or your system is question has no dvd drive at all?, like all those new Net books for sale at around 100$ that only come with linux or some other kind of web browser interface ?
Well i am here to save the day! because i have been on the computer business for a long while, and i have been installing windows systems daily, and having to swap discs from system to system is a real hassle, the dvd's get scratched and customers often loose them, and i cant afford to buy every single windows DVD version for every single customer.
-START LESSON-
Have you ever had the need to install windows 7 onto your computer only to find the dvd drive is dead, or your system is question has no dvd drive at all?, like all those new Net books for sale at around 100$ that only come with linux or some other kind of web browser interface ?
Well i am here to save the day! because i have been on the computer business for a long while, and i have been installing windows systems daily, and having to swap discs from system to system is a real hassle, the dvd's get scratched and customers often loose them, and i cant afford to buy every single windows DVD version for every single customer.
-START LESSON-
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
To RefurBish or Not Refurbish! that is the question! (HARD DRIVES)
Oh hello there, so nice to see you again :D
You may have heard about REFURBISHED items which are basically items that have been reworked, fixed, re calibrated, re packaged in order to be sold once more to the consumer in an effort to re-cycle and re sell otherwise well and functioning product, Most of the times, since we like new and shiny and "un-handled" these products are cut down in price, we have to make clear, these are not Used(mostly) and worn out items, that you find in outlets, here is a little deeper explanation:
You may have heard about REFURBISHED items which are basically items that have been reworked, fixed, re calibrated, re packaged in order to be sold once more to the consumer in an effort to re-cycle and re sell otherwise well and functioning product, Most of the times, since we like new and shiny and "un-handled" these products are cut down in price, we have to make clear, these are not Used(mostly) and worn out items, that you find in outlets, here is a little deeper explanation:
he is such a great sales man!
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
100% Cpu usage - Hardware Interrupt calls!
Oh boy do i have something on my hands right now, a computer a compaq Presario sr1615la that right from the start of windows xp login screen, is slugish and has a 100% cpu utilization, we ruled out any kind of virus and rootkit, after searching and searching for every possible hidden culprit, i opted to use ProcessExp, a nifty great tool to find what program is hoggin the CPU, turns out the program identifies a "Hardware interrupt calls" procces at 99%, Installing a fresh copy of windows on the same hardware yields the same result!
At this age and day, an interrupt problem reminds me of the past, where you had to reserve and give IRQ's for special hardware, sound cards usually where IRQ5, network cards where IRQ 9 or 11, and video cards where 9 or 14, and if you happened to have two diferent hardware cards with the same IRQ, things usualy did not work at all , or made fort a very unstable system, these days we dont need to fumble with any of that, since the motherboard and operating systems work on the PNP method "plug and play"
At this age and day, an interrupt problem reminds me of the past, where you had to reserve and give IRQ's for special hardware, sound cards usually where IRQ5, network cards where IRQ 9 or 11, and video cards where 9 or 14, and if you happened to have two diferent hardware cards with the same IRQ, things usualy did not work at all , or made fort a very unstable system, these days we dont need to fumble with any of that, since the motherboard and operating systems work on the PNP method "plug and play"
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
BACK UP YOUR DATA, Before your hard drive dies!
Ah computers, we have invested our dollars in them for gaming and or for work, and storing our information, those nifty pictures of your trip out of the country, the beautifull visages, mountain ranges and the memories with your loved ones, and all this can dissapear in a second!
You see, we often overlook the fragility of a hard drive, the magic that happens every time we boot up our system, how the drive heads float and glide across the disks surfaces on a small bead of air, how the magnetic fields are read, interpreted, in a well orchestrated fashion. time after time, without failure, a work of art, but things can always fail, and hard drives are not meant to work perfectly forever!.
BRIEF HISTORY
Since the dawn of computing, computers where used to calculate data and get results, but there was also the need to store information in a way that could be readable at a later time, the binary system has always been the way to go, in the form of circuity inside the computer processors, switches that have 2 states (binary), on and off, data is broken down in binary code, zeros and ones, and soon it was possible to store data, in the form of "punch" cards, thick paper cards with holes in them to store a 1 (a hole) and a 0 (no hole), and soon in the form of magnetic media, a positive magnetic field for a 1 and negative field for a 0, magnetic tapes, magnetic disks, all you needed was head that reads and writes the magnetic field accordingly, and this method became the mainstream even to our days (flash memory media came to aid us, but more on that later)
Just as a magnetic head would send pulses of positive or negative energy along a magnetic tape, the same method was applied, take the strip , lay it down and bend it to form a flat circle, you got yourself a track!, now bunch up a lot of tracks together, and you have yourself the basic principle of magnetic disk media, From the old 8" 1/2 , 5" 1/4 or 3" 1/2 floppy drives, up to metal hard disks, a round plate surface full of tracks, in which you can store data with magnetic pulses.
WHERE IT FAILS
You see, we often overlook the fragility of a hard drive, the magic that happens every time we boot up our system, how the drive heads float and glide across the disks surfaces on a small bead of air, how the magnetic fields are read, interpreted, in a well orchestrated fashion. time after time, without failure, a work of art, but things can always fail, and hard drives are not meant to work perfectly forever!.
BRIEF HISTORY
Since the dawn of computing, computers where used to calculate data and get results, but there was also the need to store information in a way that could be readable at a later time, the binary system has always been the way to go, in the form of circuity inside the computer processors, switches that have 2 states (binary), on and off, data is broken down in binary code, zeros and ones, and soon it was possible to store data, in the form of "punch" cards, thick paper cards with holes in them to store a 1 (a hole) and a 0 (no hole), and soon in the form of magnetic media, a positive magnetic field for a 1 and negative field for a 0, magnetic tapes, magnetic disks, all you needed was head that reads and writes the magnetic field accordingly, and this method became the mainstream even to our days (flash memory media came to aid us, but more on that later)
Just as a magnetic head would send pulses of positive or negative energy along a magnetic tape, the same method was applied, take the strip , lay it down and bend it to form a flat circle, you got yourself a track!, now bunch up a lot of tracks together, and you have yourself the basic principle of magnetic disk media, From the old 8" 1/2 , 5" 1/4 or 3" 1/2 floppy drives, up to metal hard disks, a round plate surface full of tracks, in which you can store data with magnetic pulses.
WHERE IT FAILS
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