Search Results

Search found 11542 results on 462 pages for 'disc drive'.

Page 1/462 | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12  | Next Page >

• The Best Free Tools for Creating a Bootable Windows or Linux USB Drive

  - by Lori Kaufman

  If you need to install Windows or Linux and you don’t have access to a CD/DVD drive, a bootable USB drive is the solution. You can boot to the USB drive, using it to run the OS setup program, just like a CD or DVD. We have collected some links to free programs that allow you to easily setup a USB drive to install Windows or Linux on a computer. NOTE: If you have problems getting the BIOS on your computer to let you boot from a USB drive, see our article about booting from a USB drive even if your BIOS won’t let you. What Is the Purpose of the “Do Not Cover This Hole” Hole on Hard Drives? How To Log Into The Desktop, Add a Start Menu, and Disable Hot Corners in Windows 8 HTG Explains: Why You Shouldn’t Use a Task Killer On Android

  Read the article

• Windows XP mounting USB drive to same letter as previously mapped network drive

  - by GAThrawn

  Why does Windows always mount a USB drive as the next drive letter after the last physical drive, even when that letter is already taken by a mapped drive, and is there any way to improve this behaviour? What happens is I tend to use a few different flash drives on my PC, as well as having both a Blackberry and a personal phone that mount as USB drives when I plug them in to charge. Being on a corporate PC I also have a number of mapped network drives (some set by login script, some set as persistent mappings in my profile). When I first login I'll have drive letters like this: C: - Local Drive D: - DVD Drive G: - Login script mapped drive J: - Login script mapped drive When I plug the Blackberry in it'll mount two drives (one for onboard storage, one for the SD card) as E: and F:. If I then plug in another USB drive it will mount as G:, even though that's already taken by a network mapped drive. This leaves me with the following drives: C: - Local Drive D: - DVD Drive E: - USB drive (Blackberry) F: - USB drive (Blackberry) G: - Login script mapped drive [G: - USB drive - mounted but not visible in Explorer or command prompt] J: - Login script mapped drive I then have to go into Disk Management, find the new USB drive that's mounted to G: and re-assign it to another letter eg Z:, once this is done Auto-Play detects it and throws up its normal dialog, and its browseable in Explorer. While this is OK to do if you only use one or two USB drives and have admin access to your PC with your login account, its a total pain in the proverbial if you regularly use a whole load of different USB devices, and corporate policy means you have one account for your normal login (that only has User access to workstations), but have to use a different account for any privileged action. I realize that one possible reason for this is the difference between hardware which is mounted and assigned drive letters at the systen level, and mapped drives which are done at the user level. For USB devices that are already plugged in before login, then obviously they're mounted before Windows knows what network drives may be mapped. However if you plug the USB devices in after you're fully logged in and have drives mapped then Windows must know which letters are available?

  Read the article

• Creating a shortcut to a program on thumb drive without drive letter

  - by Seth Spearman

  Is there a way to create a shortcut to an EXE on a USB thumb drive that will work no matter what drive letter is assigned to the thumb drive? I have a program in a folder on a thumb drive. I want to create a shortcut in the root of the thumb drive that points to the program's EXE and will work no matter what drive letter is assigned to the thumb drive. How can I do this?

  Read the article

• Disc Drives: An Endangered Species

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  More and more computers are shipping sans-disc drive leading many industry watchers to proclaim the optical disc an endangered species on its way out. Do you still use your drive or are you letting the disc go? CNN Tech reports on the trend: Apple’s new iMac, its flagship desktop computer, was released Friday. For the first time, it has no disc drive. This marks a trend that has already begun on some laptops, like Apple’s MacBook Airs, and of course with mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. “Over time, an optical disc will be as much of an historical curiosity as a floppy disk,” said Michael Gartenberg, a tech-industry analyst with research firm Gartner Inc. According to Apple, where sleeker, thinner designs are always en vogue, dumping the disc drive was a no-brainer. How to Factory Reset Your Android Phone or Tablet When It Won’t Boot Our Geek Trivia App for Windows 8 is Now Available Everywhere How To Boot Your Android Phone or Tablet Into Safe Mode

  Read the article

• Determining physical location of data on a disc

  - by Synetech

  Does anybody know of a way to find out where, physically on a CD or DVD a given piece of data would be located? I am trying to watch a DVD at the moment, and am about half-way through, but it keeps dying at a specific spot in the film, presumably because of a scratch. I have a repair kit, but I don’t know where to focus my repair because there are several scuffs and scratches on the disc and I have no way of knowing which one is causing the issue. Obviously, cleaning all of them is inadvisable because not only does it waste the consumable materials in the kit, but not all of them are a problem, and by working them, some may become unreadable. Moreover, just because I am half-way through the movie does not mean that it would be half-way from the hub to the edge for several reasons: Discs have more data towards the outer edge than the inner edge (circles are more mathematically complicated than rectangles) The disc is not completely filled up (and even if it were, the movie itself would be be using it all, there are extras and such) Because in this particular case it is a commercial DVD, it is also dual-layer which further complicates manual determination As such, I am trying to find a program that can let me identify a file (or part thereof), cluster, etc. and show me a picture of where on the CD/DVD it would be located. That way, I can look at the disc and fix any scratches that correspond to that distance from the hub. For example, the image below might indicate where on a disc a couple of files or range of clusters would be located, so by looking for anomalies in those areas (rotating as necessary), the correct one can be identified. I’m sure it can be done since at least one form of copy protection (DPM) uses it and DVD-lab Pro includes a “DVD Topology” feature to do this.

  Read the article

• Unable to recognize hard drive after replacing a drive

  - by Peter Schriver

  I have a Poweredge 830 that I had been using with 1 OS Sata drive and 3 data drives. One of the drives had some failing sectors so I replaced it with a different drive. For some bizarre reason the computer would not reboot so I disconnected all of the media drives and did a clean reinstall on the OS drive. Only the boot drive and one of the media drives are now recognized by my Bios. Drive 0 and 2. Drive 1 and 3 are listed in the Bios as "Unkown Device" Any help would be appreciated I think there may be something wrong with the install. For some reason when I attempt to change the display it says I have a laptop.If you think a reinstall is in order I will try that.

  Read the article

• Hard drive mounted at / , duplicate mounted hard drive after using MountManager

  - by HellHarvest

  possible duplicate post I'm running 12.04 64bit. My system is a dual boot for both Ubuntu and Windows7. Both operating systems are sharing the drive named "Elements". My volume named "Elements" is a 1TB SATA NTFS hard drive that shows up twice in the side bar in nautilus. One of the icons is functional and even has the convenient "eject" icon next to it. Below is a picture of the left menu in Nautilus, with System Monitor-File Systems tab open on top of it. Can someone advise me about how to get rid of this extra icon? I think the problem is much more deep-rooted than just a GUI glitch on Nautilus' part. The other icon does nothing but spit out the following error when I click on it (image below). This only happened AFTER I tried using Mount Manager to automate mounting the drive at start up. I've already uninstalled Mount Manager, and restarted, but the problem didn't go away. The hard drive does mount automatically now, so I guess that's cool. But now, every time I boot up now and open Nautilus, BOTH of these icons appear, one of which is fictitious and useless. According to the image above and the outputs of several other commands, it appears to be mounted at / In which case, no matter where I am in Nautilus when I try to click on that icon, of course it will tell me that that drive is in use by another program... Nautilus. I'm afraid of trying to unmount this hard drive (sdb6) because of where it appears to be mounted. I'm kind of a noob, and I have this gut feeling that tells me trying to unmount a drive at / will destroy my entire file system. This fear was further strengthened by the output of "$ fsck" at the very bottom of this post. Error immediately below when that 2nd "Elements" hard drive is clicked in Nautilus: Unable to mount Elements Mount is denied because the NTFS volume is already exclusively opened. The volume may be already mounted, or another software may use it which could be identified for example by the help of the 'fuser' command. It's odd to me that that error message above claims that it's an NTFS volume when everything else tell me that it's an ext4 volume. The actual hard drive "Elements" is in fact an NTFS volume. Here's the output of a few commands and configuration files that may be of interest: $ fuser -a / /: 2120r 2159rc 2160rc 2172r 2178rc 2180rc 2188r 2191rc 2200rc 2203rc 2205rc 2206r 2211r 2212r 2214r 2220r 2228r 2234rc 2246rc 2249rc 2254rc 2260rc 2261r 2262r 2277rc 2287rc 2291rc 2311rc 2313rc 2332rc 2334rc 2339rc 2343rc 2344rc 2352rc 2372rc 2389rc 2422r 2490r 2496rc 2501rc 2566r 2573rc 2581rc 2589rc 2592r 2603r 2611rc 2613rc 2615rc 2678rc 2927r 2981r 3104rc 4156rc 4196rc 4206rc 4213rc 4240rc 4297rc 5032rc 7609r 7613r 7648r 9593rc 18829r 18833r 19776r $ sudo df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sdb6 496G 366G 106G 78% / udev 2.0G 4.0K 2.0G 1% /dev tmpfs 791M 1.5M 790M 1% /run none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock none 2.0G 672K 2.0G 1% /run/shm /dev/sda1 932G 312G 620G 34% /media/Elements /home/solderblob/.Private 496G 366G 106G 78% /home/solderblob /dev/sdb2 188G 100G 88G 54% /media/A2B24EACB24E852F /dev/sdb1 100M 25M 76M 25% /media/System Reserved $ sudo fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00093cab Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 2048 1953519615 976758784 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT Disk /dev/sdb: 750.2 GB, 750156374016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 91201 cylinders, total 1465149168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000e8d9b Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 2048 206847 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sdb2 206848 392378768 196085960+ 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sdb3 392380414 1465147391 536383489 5 Extended /dev/sdb5 1456762880 1465147391 4192256 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sdb6 392380416 1448374271 527996928 83 Linux /dev/sdb7 1448376320 1456758783 4191232 82 Linux swap / Solaris Partition table entries are not in disk order $ cat /etc/fstab # <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> UUID=77039a2a-83d4-47a1-8a8c-a2ec4e4dfd0e / ext4 defaults 0 1 UUID=F6549CC4549C88CF /media/Elements ntfs-3g users 0 0 $ sudo blkid /dev/sda1: LABEL="Elements" UUID="F6549CC4549C88CF" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sdb1: LABEL="System Reserved" UUID="5CDE130FDE12E156" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sdb2: UUID="A2B24EACB24E852F" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sdb6: UUID="77039a2a-83d4-47a1-8a8c-a2ec4e4dfd0e" TYPE="ext4" $ sudo blkid -c /dev/null (appears to be exactly the same as above) /dev/sda1: LABEL="Elements" UUID="F6549CC4549C88CF" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sdb1: LABEL="System Reserved" UUID="5CDE130FDE12E156" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sdb2: UUID="A2B24EACB24E852F" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sdb6: UUID="77039a2a-83d4-47a1-8a8c-a2ec4e4dfd0e" TYPE="ext4" $ mount /dev/sdb6 on / type ext4 (rw) proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) none on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw) none on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw) none on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw) udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755) devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620) tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,size=10%,mode=0755) none on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=5242880) none on /run/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev) /dev/sda1 on /media/Elements type fuseblk (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096) binfmt_misc on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) /home/solderblob/.Private on /home/solderblob type ecryptfs (ecryptfs_check_dev_ruid,ecryptfs_cipher=aes,ecryptfs_key_bytes=16,ecryptfs_unlink_sigs,ecryptfs_sig=76a47b0175afa48d,ecryptfs_fnek_sig=391b2d8b155215f7) gvfs-fuse-daemon on /home/solderblob/.gvfs type fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=solderblob) /dev/sdb2 on /media/A2B24EACB24E852F type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,default_permissions,blksize=4096) /dev/sdb1 on /media/System Reserved type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,default_permissions,blksize=4096) $ ls -a . A2B24EACB24E852F Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS amd64 .. Elements System Reserved $ cat /proc/mounts rootfs / rootfs rw 0 0 sysfs /sys sysfs rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0 proc /proc proc rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0 udev /dev devtmpfs rw,relatime,size=2013000k,nr_inodes=503250,mode=755 0 0 devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000 0 0 tmpfs /run tmpfs rw,nosuid,relatime,size=809872k,mode=755 0 0 /dev/disk/by-uuid/77039a2a-83d4-47a1-8a8c-a2ec4e4dfd0e / ext4 rw,relatime,user_xattr,acl,barrier=1,data=ordered 0 0 none /sys/fs/fuse/connections fusectl rw,relatime 0 0 none /sys/kernel/debug debugfs rw,relatime 0 0 none /sys/kernel/security securityfs rw,relatime 0 0 none /run/lock tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=5120k 0 0 none /run/shm tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime 0 0 /dev/sda1 /media/Elements fuseblk rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,allow_other,blksize=4096 0 0 binfmt_misc /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0 /home/solderblob/.Private /home/solderblob ecryptfs rw,relatime,ecryptfs_fnek_sig=391b2d8b155215f7,ecryptfs_sig=76a47b0175afa48d,ecryptfs_cipher=aes,ecryptfs_key_bytes=16,ecryptfs_unlink_sigs 0 0 gvfs-fuse-daemon /home/solderblob/.gvfs fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=1000,group_id=1000 0 0 /dev/sdb2 /media/A2B24EACB24E852F fuseblk rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096 0 0 /dev/sdb1 /media/System\040Reserved fuseblk rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096 0 0 gvfs-fuse-daemon /root/.gvfs fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0 0 0 $ fsck fsck from util-linux 2.20.1 e2fsck 1.42 (29-Nov-2011) /dev/sdb6 is mounted. WARNING!!! The filesystem is mounted. If you continue you ***WILL*** cause ***SEVERE*** filesystem damage. Do you really want to continue<n>? no check aborted.

  Read the article

• 1.5 TB USB Drive failed to mount

  - by user89348

  Seagate 1.5Tb FreeAgent USB Hard Drive. Formatted FAT32. I figure it is 75% full. Used to work fine in XUBUNTU it shows up in Cairo Dock but when I click on it I get "failed to mount drive'. Nautilus does not display the icon nor does Thunar. Windows Vista will no longer recognise drive either. Back Track 5R3 also no longer fails to mount it. BUT and here is the BIG BUT my Pioneer DV-410 reads the files and plays the everything just fine. I believe this all happened after an unclean shutdown / XUbuntu 12.10 system freeze. Why can't XUBUNTU mount this drive when a crappy 13 year old DVD player can mount it. I am desperate to back up the data before just in case the drive becomes completely unreadable. Using XUBUNTU 12.10 Quantal current 3.5.0.17 Kernel (past 3 Kernels wont read it either) and all newest apt-get update / dist-upgrade are applied. I will post any other info you folks request as needed. Additional info as requested by githlar. $ sudo fsck.vfat /dev/sdb dosfsck 3.0.13, 30 Jun 2012, FAT32, LFN Read 512 bytes at 0:Input/output error $ lsusb Bus 001 Device 003: ID 148f:3070 Ralink Technology, Corp. RT2870/RT3070 Wireless Adapter Bus 002 Device 002: ID 0bc2:3001 Seagate RSS LLC Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub

  Read the article

• how to i lock a Harddrive to a certain drive letter

  - by Memor-X

  i have an external hard drive that i have set to Drive F which on it contains some programs that i have shortcuts on the desktop how i have a second external hard drive which i store my music on which is auto assigned to Drive E, due to someone thinking that Australians love to have f** wings on power plugs for hard drives while power boards have each socket close together i can have both of these hard drives set at the same time my music hard drive i normally only plug up when i sync music to my ipod but on occasion when i unplug my music hard drive and plug my old one back in or at times when i turn on my computer with the music hard drive in, turn off my computer and turn it back on with my old hard drive it's drive letter gets switched to E i get annoyed having to always go into disk management and change the drive letter back to F when this happens so i am wondering if I can lock my hard drive to always be F, if anything else tries to be F it can fail for all i care If there is a batch file i can use that'll go though all the steps of Disk Management to change a drive's letter, that way i can set it up in the startup folder

  Read the article

• Why is my external USB hard drive sometimes completely inaccessible?

  - by Eliah Kagan

  I have an external USB hard drive, consisting of an 1 TB SATA drive in a Rosewill RX35-AT-SU SLV Aluminum 3.5" Silver USB 2.0 External Enclosure, plugged into my SONY VAIO VGN-NS310F laptop. It is plugged directly into the computer (not through a hub). The drive inside the enclosure is a 7200 rpm Western Digital, but I don't remember the exact model. I can remove the drive from the enclosure (again), if people think it's necessary to know that detail. The drive is formatted ext4. I mount it dynamically with udisks on my Lubuntu 11.10 system, usually automatically via PCManFM. (I have had Lubuntu 12.04 on this machine, and experienced all this same behavior with that too.) Every once in a while--once or twice a day--it becomes inaccessible, and difficult to unmount. Attempting to unmount it with sudo umount ... gives an error message saying the drive is in use and suggesting fuser and lsof to find out what is using it. Killing processes found to be using the drive with fuser and lsof is sometimes sufficient to let me unmount it, but usually isn't. Once the drive is unmounted or the machine is rebooted, the drive will not mount. Plugging in the drive and turning it on registers nothing on the computer. dmesg is unchanged. The drive's access light usually blinks vigorously, as though the drive is being accessed constantly. Then eventually, after I keep the drive off for a while (half an hour), I am able to mount it again. While the drive doesn't work on this machine for a while, it will work immediately on another machine running the same version of Ubuntu. Sometimes bringing it back over from the other machine seems to "fix" it. Sometimes it doesn't. The drive doesn't always stop being accessible while mounted, before becoming unmountable. Sometimes it works fine, I turn off the computer, I turn the computer back on, and I cannot mount the drive. Currently this is the only drive with which I have this problem, but I've had problems that I think are the same as this, with different drives, on different Ubuntu machines. This laptop has another external USB drive plugged into it regularly, which doesn't have this problem. Unplugging that drive before plugging in the "problem" drive doesn't fix the problem. I've opened the drive up and made sure the connections were tight in the past, and that didn't seem to help (any more than waiting the same amount of time that it took to open and close the drive, before attempting to remount it). Does anyone have any ideas about what could be causing this, what troubleshooting steps I should perform, and/or how I could fix this problem altogether? Update: I tried replacing the USB data cable (from the enclosure to the laptop), as Merlin suggested. I should've tried that long ago, since it fits the symptoms perfectly (the drive works on another machine, which would make sense because the cable would be bent at a different angle, possibly completing a circuit of frayed wires). Unfortunately, though, this did not help--I have the same problem with the new cable. I'll try to provide additional detailed information about the drive inside the enclosure, next time I'm able to get the drive working. (At the moment I don't have another machine available to attach it.) Major Update (28 June 2012) The drive seems to have deteriorated considerably. I think this is so, because I've attached it to another machine and gotten lots of errors about invalid characters, when copying files from it. I am less interested in recovering data from the drive than I am in figuring out what is wrong with it. I specifically want to figure out if the problem is the drive or the enclosure. Now, when I plug the drive into the original machine where I was having the problems, it still doesn't appear (including with sudo fdisk -l), but it is recognized by the kernel and messages are added to dmesg. Most of the message consist of errors like this, repeated many times: [ 7.707593] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Unhandled sense code [ 7.707599] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Result: hostbyte=invalid driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE [ 7.707606] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Sense Key : Medium Error [current] [ 7.707614] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Add. Sense: Unrecovered read error [ 7.707621] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00 [ 7.707636] end_request: critical target error, dev sdc, sector 0 [ 7.707641] Buffer I/O error on device sdc, logical block 0 Here are all the lines from dmesg starting with when the drive is recognized. Please note that: I'm back to running Lubuntu 12.04 on this machine (and perhaps that's a factor in better error messages). Now that the drive has been plugged into another machine and back into this one, and also now that this machine is back to running 12.04, the drive's access light doesn't blink as I had described. Looking at the drive, it would appear as though it is working normally, with low or no access. This behavior (the errors) occurs when rebooting the machine with the drive plugged in, and also when manually plugging in the drive. A few of the messages are about /dev/sdb. That drive is working fine. The bad drive is /dev/sdc. I just didn't want to edit anything out from the middle.

  Read the article

• Make a Drive Image Using an Ubuntu Live CD

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  Cloning a hard drive is useful, but what if you have to make several copies, or you just want to make a complete backup of a hard drive? Drive images let you put everything, and we mean everything, from your hard drive in one big file. With an Ubuntu Live CD, this is a simple process – the versatile tool dd can do this for us right out of the box. We’ve used dd to clone a hard drive before. Making a drive image is very similar, except instead of copying data from one hard drive to another, we copy from a hard drive to a file. Drive images are more flexible, as you can do what you please with the data once you’ve pulled it off the source drive. Your drive image is going to be a big file, depending on the size of your source drive – dd will copy every bit of it, even if there’s only one tiny file stored on the whole hard drive. So, to start, make sure you have a device connected to your computer that will be large enough to hold the drive image. Some ideas for places to store the drive image, and how to connect to them in an Ubuntu Live CD, can be found at this previous Live CD article. In this article, we’re going to make an image of a 1GB drive, and store it on another hard drive in the same PC. Note: always be cautious when using dd, as it’s very easy to completely wipe out a drive, as we will show later in this article. Creating a Drive Image Boot up into the Ubuntu Live CD environment. Since we’re going to store the drive image on a local hard drive, we first have to mount it. Click on Places and then the location that you want to store the image on – in our case, a 136GB internal drive. Open a terminal window (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and navigate to the newly mounted drive. All mounted drives should be in /media, so we’ll use the command cd /media and then type the first few letters of our difficult-to-type drive, press tab to auto-complete the name, and switch to that directory. If you wish to place the drive image in a specific folder, then navigate to it now. We’ll just place our drive image in the root of our mounted drive. The next step is to determine the identifier for the drive you want to make an image of. In the terminal window, type in the command sudo fdisk -l Our 1GB drive is /dev/sda, so we make a note of that. Now we’ll use dd to make the image. The invocation is sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=./OldHD.img This means that we want to copy from the input file (“if”) /dev/sda (our source drive) to the output file (“of”) OldHD.img, which is located in the current working directory (that’s the “.” portion of the “of” string). It takes some time, but our image has been created…Let’s test to make sure it works. Drive Image Testing: Wiping the Drive Another interesting thing that dd can do is totally wipe out the data on a drive (a process we’ve covered before). The command for that is sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda This takes some random data as input, and outputs it to our drive, /dev/sda. If we examine the drive now using sudo fdisk –l, we can see that the drive is, indeed, wiped. Drive Image Testing: Restoring the Drive Image We can restore our drive image with a call to dd that’s very similar to how we created the image. The only difference is that the image is going to be out input file, and the drive now our output file. The exact invocation is sudo dd if=./OldHD.img of=/dev/sda It takes a while, but when it’s finished, we can confirm with sudo fdisk –l that our drive is back to the way it used to be! Conclusion There are a lots of reasons to create a drive image, with backup being the most obvious. Fortunately, with dd creating a drive image only takes one line in a terminal window – if you’ve got an Ubuntu Live CD handy! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Reset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CDCreate a Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive the Easy WayHow to Browse Without a Trace with an Ubuntu Live CDWipe, Delete, and Securely Destroy Your Hard Drive’s Data the Easy WayClone a Hard Drive Using an Ubuntu Live CD TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Microsoft Office Web Apps Guide Know if Someone Accessed Your Facebook Account Shop for Music with Windows Media Player 12 Access Free Documentaries at BBC Documentaries Rent Cameras In Bulk At CameraRenter Download Songs From MySpace

  Read the article

• Slow transfer to external USB3 hard drive

  - by JMP

  Trying to backup data from hard drive before reloading windows following some issue with its load. Having trouble with the file transfer to a USB3/2 external hard drive NTFS. Getting transfer speed of about 116.7kB/sec. In other words its taking about 5 hours to transfer 1.4GB. I've got about 80GB to go. So the transfer is going to take 11days. Seems a little on the slow side. Am I missing something? Is there a way to make this faster. No issue with the external drive transferring this amount in windows. But don't have that option at the moment.

  Read the article

• How does a hard drive compare to Flash memory working as a hard drive in terms of speed?

  - by Jian Lin

  Some experiment I did with hard drive read/write speed was 10MB/s write and 40MB/s read, and with a USB Flash drive, it can be 5MB/s write and 10MB/s read. Also, if I put a virtual hard drive .vhd file in a hard drive or in a USB Flash drive and try a Virtual Machine using it, the one using the hard drive is quite fast, while the one using the USB Flash drive is close to not usable. So I wonder some early netbooks use 4GB or 8GB flash memory as the hard drive, and even the Apple Mac Air has an option of using flash memory instead of a hard drive. But in those situation, will the speed be slower than using a hard drive, like in the case of a USB Flash drive?

  Read the article

• How do I copy an existing hard disc to a new one so I can boot off the new disc?

  - by Brian Hooper

  I currently have a failing hard drive which is the only hard drive in the machine. I have just bought a new hard drive to replace it, and my plan is to copy the contents of the old drive onto the new one, and then replace the old drive in the machine with the new one. I presumably can't just copy the whole directory structure (or can I)? What do I need to do to manage this, assuming it is possible? Is there a utility to do this for me? (The old drive is hopefully good for a few more hours.) (I hope by this means to keep all the software and configuration files as they are, to avoid having to re-install everything. Can that be done?)

  Read the article

• Programatically check whether a drive letter is a shared/network drive

  - by Philip Daubmeier

  Hi SO community! I searched a while but found nothing that helped me. Is there a way to check whether a drive letter stands for a shared drive/network drive or a local disc in python? I guess there is some windows api function that gives me that info, but I cant find it. Perhaps there is even a method already integrated in python? What I am looking for is something with this or similar behaviour: someMagicMethod("C:\") #outputs True 'is a local drive' someMagicMethod("Z:\") #outputs False 'is a shared drive' That would help me as well: someMagicMethod2() #outputs list of shared drive letters Thanks a lot in advance!

  Read the article

• Disc drive busy on MacBook, with disc stuck inside.

  - by ayaz

  I have a white MacBook, running Snow Leopard, 10.6.3 with the latest updates. I popped in a DVD that the system failed to mount. I did not see any conspicuous errors. As a result of this failure, the DVD got stuck in the drive. Neither pressing the eject button on the keyboard nor running the diskutil eject command caused the DVD to come out. The commands drutil eject and drutil tray open could not get the DVD to budge at all. The 'mount' and 'eject' buttons on the window for Disk Utility are dimmed out, while it is written in the middle for the DVD drive that that particular disc drive is busy. This is not the first time this has happened with me. I know that I will ultimately have to resort to rebooting the system and holding down the eject button to get the DVD to come out. But, is there any workaround that does not involve rebooting the system and prying the disc out? The drive on this MacBook does not have a needle-pin reset button -- at least, I couldn't find it anywhere. Any help will be greatly appreciated. Many thanks.

  Read the article

• Windows 7 disc not recognized by DVD drive

  - by Ed Manet

  My machine is a recent model Systemax, less than 2 years old. It came with Vista 32bit and I bought Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade for it. When I insert the Windows 7 DVD into the drive, it churns a little but does not recognize the disc. If I double click the DVD drive icon, it prompts me to insert a disc. I tried a different DVD (Office 2007) and the drive recognized the disc. I tried the Windows 7 disc in my Dell laptop and it recognized the disc. So basically, the disc is good and the drive is good, but they don't like each other. I tried to boot to the Windows 7 DVD and the system did not see it. I turned off the Lightscribe service and that didn't help. Does anybody have an idea what's wrong here? Thanks.

  Read the article

• External USB hard-drive changing drive letter

  - by Sydius

  I have a Seagate FreeAgent Go external USB hard drive that was mounted but mysteriously decided to reconnect itself: Sep 30 15:07:06 feinman kernel: [243901.551604] usb 1-1.2: USB disconnect, device number 3 Sep 30 15:07:06 feinman kernel: [243901.553828] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Synchronizing SCSI cache Sep 30 15:07:06 feinman kernel: [243901.553893] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_NO_CONNECT driverbyte=DRIVER_OK Sep 30 15:07:10 feinman kernel: [243905.336557] usb 1-1.2: new high-speed USB device number 4 using ehci_hcd Sep 30 15:07:10 feinman kernel: [243905.431219] scsi7 : usb-storage 1-1.2:1.0 Sep 30 15:07:11 feinman kernel: [243906.427207] scsi 7:0:0:0: Direct-Access Seagate FreeAgent Go 0148 PQ: 0 ANSI: 4 Sep 30 15:07:11 feinman kernel: [243906.428303] sd 7:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0 Sep 30 15:07:11 feinman kernel: [243906.430317] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] 625142447 512-byte logical blocks: (320 GB/298 GiB) Sep 30 15:07:11 feinman kernel: [243906.430860] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off Sep 30 15:07:11 feinman kernel: [243906.430865] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 1c 00 00 00 Sep 30 15:07:11 feinman kernel: [243906.431386] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA Sep 30 15:07:11 feinman kernel: [243906.493674] sdc: sdc1 Sep 30 15:07:11 feinman kernel: [243906.496109] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI disk It changed from sdb to sdc, causing a number of problems for me. What can I do to further track down the cause? I thought it might be a problem with it sleeping but when I cat /sys/class/scsi_disk/6\:0\:0\:0/allow_restart, I see that it's already 1.

  Read the article

• External USB hard drive makes noises when the computer is turned off

  - by Amir Adar

  I have an external USB hard drive of 500GB. I can't tell what model it is exactly, as nothing specific is written on it and I don't have the box anymore. I use it as a backup disk. It works absolutely fine when the computer is turned on: no problems with writing or reading, and everything is done in dead silence. However, if I turn the computer off and the disk is still connected, it stays on and makes clicking noises. For that reason I only connect it when I need to back up or restore. Does that mean there's a problem with the disk, or with some preferences in the system itself? Or something else?

  Read the article

• Inserted DVD disc not recognized

  - by Vineen Malig Manarang

  com! I was trying to watch FairyTail on my Ubuntu laptop, however, whenever I insert the disc, the CD/DVD drive icon on the Computer pane disappears, seems that it cannot detect what type of disc was inserted. I am running on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and new to these things as I used to be comfortable with Windows doing the things for me. IMMEDIATE HELP WILL BE APPRECIATED as I just borrowed this DVD from a mate and allowed me to watch it until I finish the episodes inside the CD. Many thanks, Vineen

  Read the article

• Ubuntu 9.1 Install from Disc Stalls After "Install Ubuntu" Sleclection is Made - eMachine

  - by nicorellius

  I am trying to install Ubuntu 9.1 from the ISO on a CD (it needs to be this version) on an eMachine with a brand new Seagate hard disk. The CD boots OK, and I choose the language. Then I am presented with the choices: Try Ubuntu Install Ubuntu.... etc, etc... I have tried the top two choices several times (trying Ubuntu and installing it), but each and every time the installation stalls and the disc stops spinning right after I hit enter after choosing the option I want. I have tried different CD/DVD drives, changing the jumpers on both CD drives, different hard drives, and nothing works. Maybe there is a BIOS setting that is choking the installation? Any help would be appreciated.

  Read the article

• Monitor your Hard Drive’s Health with Acronis Drive Monitor

  - by Matthew Guay

  Are you worried that your computer’s hard drive could die without any warning?  Here’s how you can keep tabs on it and get the first warning signs of potential problems before you actually lose your critical data. Hard drive failures are one of the most common ways people lose important data from their computers.  As more of our memories and important documents are stored digitally, a hard drive failure can mean the loss of years of work.  Acronis Drive Monitor helps you avert these disasters by warning you at the first signs your hard drive may be having trouble.  It monitors many indicators, including heat, read/write errors, total lifespan, and more. It then notifies you via a taskbar popup or email that problems have been detected.  This early warning lets you know ahead of time that you may need to purchase a new hard drive and migrate your data before it’s too late. Getting Started Head over to the Acronis site to download Drive Monitor (link below).  You’ll need to enter your name and email, and then you can download this free tool. Also, note that the download page may ask if you want to include a trial of their for-pay backup program.  If you wish to simply install the Drive Monitor utility, click Continue without adding. Run the installer when the download is finished.  Follow the prompts and install as normal. Once it’s installed, you can quickly get an overview of your hard drives’ health.  Note that it shows 3 categories: Disk problems, Acronis backup, and Critical Events.  On our computer, we had Seagate DiskWizard, an image backup utility based on Acronis Backup, installed, and Acronis detected it. Drive Monitor stays running in your tray even when the application window is closed.  It will keep monitoring your hard drives, and will alert you if there’s a problem. Find Detailed Information About Your Hard Drives Acronis’ simple interface lets you quickly see an overview of how the drives on your computer are performing.  If you’d like more information, click the link under the description.  Here we see that one of our drives have overheated, so click Show disks to get more information. Now you can select each of your drives and see more information about them.  From the Disk overview tab that opens by default, we see that our drive is being monitored, has been running for a total of 368 days, and that it’s health is good.  However, it is running at 113F, which is over the recommended max of 107F.   The S.M.A.R.T. parameters tab gives us more detailed information about our drive.  Most users wouldn’t know what an accepted value would be, so it also shows the status.  If the value is within the accepted parameters, it will report OK; otherwise, it will show that has a problem in this area. One very interesting piece of information we can see is the total number of Power-On Hours, Start/Stop Count, and Power Cycle Count.  These could be useful indicators to check if you’re considering purchasing a second hand computer.  Simply load this program, and you’ll get a better view of how long it’s been in use. Finally, the Events tab shows each time the program gave a warning.  We can see that our drive, which had been acting flaky already, is routinely overheating even when our other hard drive was running in normal temperature ranges. Monitor Acronis Backups And Critical Errors In addition to monitoring critical stats of your hard drives, Acronis Drive Monitor also keeps up with the status of your backup software and critical events reported by Windows.  You can access these from the front page, or via the links on the left hand sidebar.  If you have any edition of any Acronis Backup product installed, it will show that it was detected.  Note that it can only monitor the backup status of the newest versions of Acronis Backup and True Image. If no Acronis backup software was installed, it will show a warning that the drive may be unprotected and will give you a link to download Acronis backup software.   If you have another backup utility installed that you wish to monitor yourself, click Configure backup monitoring, and then disable monitoring on the drives you’re monitoring yourself. Finally, you can view any detected Critical events from the Critical events tab on the left. Get Emailed When There’s a Problem One of Drive Monitor’s best features is the ability to send you an email whenever there’s a problem.  Since this program can run on any version of Windows, including the Server and Home Server editions, you can use this feature to stay on top of your hard drives’ health even when you’re not nearby.  To set this up, click Options in the top left corner. Select Alerts on the left, and then click the Change settings link to setup your email account. Enter the email address which you wish to receive alerts, and a name for the program.  Then, enter the outgoing mail server settings for your email.  If you have a Gmail account, enter the following information: Outgoing mail server (SMTP): smtp.gmail.com Port: 587 Username and Password: Your gmail address and password Check the Use encryption box, and then select TLS from the encryption options.   It will now send a test message to your email account, so check and make sure it sent ok. Now you can choose to have the program automatically email you when warnings and critical alerts appear, and also to have it send regular disk status reports.   Conclusion Whether you’ve got a brand new hard drive or one that’s seen better days, knowing the real health of your it is one of the best ways to be prepared before disaster strikes.  It’s no substitute for regular backups, but can help you avert problems.  Acronis Drive Monitor is a nice tool for this, and although we wish it wasn’t so centered around their backup offerings, we still found it a nice tool. Link Download Acronis Drive Monitor (registration required) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Quick Tip: Change Monitor Timeout From Command LineAnalyze and Manage Hard Drive Space with WinDirStatMonitor CPU, Memory, and Disk IO In Windows 7 with Taskbar MetersDefrag Multiple Hard Drives At Once In WindowsFind Your Missing USB Drive on Windows XP TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Windows 7’s WordPad is Actually Good Greate Image Viewing and Management with Zoner Photo Studio Free Windows Media Player Plus! – Cool WMP Enhancer Get Your Team’s World Cup Schedule In Google Calendar Backup Drivers With Driver Magician TubeSort: YouTube Playlist Organizer

  Read the article

• few questions on making a flash drive to a hard drive

  - by user23950

  I've found a tutorial here on how to trick the operating system to see a flash drive as a hard drive. http://www.getusb.info/usb-hack-turn-a-usb-stick-into-a-hard-drive-or-local-disk/ But I have a few questions: This trick will only work on the os wherein you updated the flash drive driver. Is there a trick that will work like this one, but if you plug in the flash drive to another computer it will still be treated as hard drive? How do I convert it back to a flash drive?

  Read the article

• CD/DVD drive not mounted when inserted with Disc of any kind

  - by Cisco Sán

  I just noticed that if a insert a CD or a DVD of any kind, the Drive will start spinning but it will not show the mounted disc. Before it used to ask me what to do with the media inserted. Now it doesn't even do that. I ran in the terminal this code: eject -n and it displays this: " eject: device is `/dev/sr0'" what can I do to get the functionality back on my drive. also ran this command: sudo mount -o ro,unhide,uid=1000 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom but in return i get this: " mount: mount point /mnt/cdrom does not exist" Running Ubuntu 11.10 HERE IS THE HISTORY UNTIL NOW thanks Waltinator: I ran the 'dmesg' but don't know what I'm looking for. Im a newbie on this. The same thing with the 'ls -rlt /var/log' command. Should I create the directory for the mount? at this point really don't know what to do. – Cisco Sán 7 hours ago Here are 3 lines from my dmesg after I successfully inserted a CD: [ 4804.416018] wlan0: no IPv6 routers present [ 8214.125450] ISdit ISO 9660 Extensions: Microsoft Joliet Level 3 [ 8214.136556] ISO 9660 Extensions: RRIP_1991A The first line is a previous event, my wireless going online. The next 2 lines are a good result. The number in square brackets is "seconds since boot", the rest of the line is usually helpful. And no, you should NOT create the mount point. Let's try to get the automatic mounting to work. – waltinator 7 hours ago ok this are my last 3 lines on the 'dmesg' [ 18.130819] init: plymouth-stop pre-start process (1396) terminated with status 1 [ 28.780011] wlan0: no IPv6 routers present [ 505.632119] CE: hpet increased min_delta_ns to 20113 nsec – Cisco Sán 6 hours ago It looks like your CD/DVD drive is not connected to the data bus, and not causing an interrupt when you insert a platter. – waltinator 6 hours ago Try dmesg | grep -A8 CD-ROM which should show you what the system thought was available when it came up. – waltinator 6 hours ago here is my printout [0.774351] scsi 0:0:0:0: CD-ROM HL-DT-ST DVD+-RW GSA-T40N A100 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5 [0.778117] sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 24x/24x writer dvd-ram cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray [0.778122] cdrom: Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20 [0.778282] sr 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi CD-ROM sr0 [0.778340] sr 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 5 [0.780416] Freeing unused kernel memory: 984k freed [0.780732] Write protecting the kernel read-only data: 10240k [0.780986] Freeing unused kernel memory: 20k freed [0.786331] Freeing unused kernel memory: 1400k freed [0.804912] udevd[90]: starting version 173 [0.874178] r8169 Gigabit Ethernet driver 2.3LK-NAPI loaded [0.874208] r8169 0000:02:00.0: PCI INT A - GSI 16 (level, low) - IRQ 16 OK, your system sees the drive. Can you open and close the tray with eject and eject -t? Run udevadm monitor while you insert a CD (type ^C when done) and see if you get "change" and "add" messages. – waltinator 6 hours ago ok, "eject" works perfectly "eject -t" does nothing. this is the message for "udevadm monitor": KERNEL[13771.009267] change /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.1/host0/target0:0:0/0:0:0:0/block/sr0 (block) UDEV [13773.878887] change /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.1/host0/target0:0:0/0:0:0 /block/sr0 (block) – Cisco Sán 6 hours ago sudo hwinfo --cdrom (the hwinfo package is installable through Software Center) describes my CD-ROM, try it. – waltinator 4 hours ago My read out from the "sudo hwinfo --cdrom" are the following: hal.1: read hal dataprocess 2753: arguments to dbus_move_error() were incorrect, assertion "(dest) == NULL || !dbus_error_is_set ((dest))" failed in file ../../dbus/dbus-errors.c line 280. This is normally a bug in some application using the D-Bus library. libhal.c 3483 : Error unsubscribing to signals, error=The name org.freedesktop.Hal was not provided by any .service files 22: SCSI 00.0: 10602 CD-ROM (DVD) [Created at block.247] Unique ID: KD9E.JgkxTS4hgl2 Parent ID: 3p2J.gdUMCD83e+E SysFS ID: /class/block/sr0 SysFS BusID: 0:0:0:0 SysFS Device Link: /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.1/host0/target0:0:0/0:0:0:0 Hardware Class: cdrom Model: "HL-DT-ST DVD+-RW GSA-T40N" Vendor: "HL-DT-ST" Device: "DVD+-RW GSA-T40N" Revision: "A100" Driver: "ata_piix", "sr" Driver Modules: "ata_piix" Device File: /dev/sr0 (/dev/sg0) Device Files: /dev/sr0, /dev/scd0, /dev/disk/by-id/ata-HL-DT-ST_DVD+_-RW_GSA-T40N_K048BJ74257, /dev/disk/by-path/pci-0000:00:1f.1-scsi-0:0:0:0, /dev/cdrom, /dev/cdrw, /dev/dvd, /dev/dvdrw Device Number: block 11:0 (char 21:0) Features: DVD Config Status: cfg=new, avail=yes, need=no, active=unknown Attached to: #17 (IDE interface) Drive Speed: 31 Volume ID: "Movie" Publisher: "INTERVIDEO" Creation date: "20050424162207000" Thanks for the help. To Castro, hope this is what you meant and sorry for the comments..

  Read the article

• Western Digitial My Book: Can't access the data on the drive

  - by Bryan Denny

  My girlfriend has this external hard drive by Western Digital called a My Book. When the external drive is connected, it does not show it as an accessible disk drive on the computer. However, it shows up fine in Device Manager: I can also see it in Disk Management, but the volume is not mapped to a drive letter, nor can I change the drive letter: It only gives me access to Delete Volume: I would rather not lose the data on the drive if possible. What can I do from here to get to the data? Things I've tried/know: Uninstall drivers and re-install them Device does the same thing when attach to either her Win7 laptop or my Win8 laptop I don't think there's an issue with the HDD itself. No clicking noises, etc. I ran Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diangostics (DLGDIAG) and the SMART Status was a "PASS", all of the SMART Disk Information looked fine. I haven't had the time to run the diag tests yet but I do not believe it's a mechanical issue. The hard drive is inside of an enclosure, I have not attempted to pry the drive out yet. How can I get Windows to properly detect this drive?

  Read the article

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12  | Next Page >