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• 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

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• 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?

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• 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?

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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.

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• 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

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• 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.

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• 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?

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• 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!

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• Use an Ubuntu Live CD to Securely Wipe Your PC’s Hard Drive

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  Deleting files or quickly formatting a drive isn’t enough for sensitive personal information. We’ll show you how to get rid of it for good using a Ubuntu Live CD. When you delete a file in Windows, Ubuntu, or any other operating system, it doesn’t actually destroy the data stored on your hard drive, it just marks that data as “deleted.” If you overwrite it later, then that data is generally unrecoverable, but if the operating system don’t happen to overwrite it, then your data is still stored on your hard drive, recoverable by anyone who has the right software. By securely delete files or entire hard drives, your data will be gone for good. Note: Modern hard drives are extremely sophisticated, as are the experts who recover data for a living. There is no guarantee that the methods covered in this article will make your data completely unrecoverable; however, they will make your data unrecoverable to the majority of recovery methods, and all methods that are readily available to the general public. Shred individual files Most of the data stored on your hard drive is harmless, and doesn’t reveal anything about you. If there are just a few files that you know you don’t want someone else to see, then the easiest way to get rid of them is a built-in Linux utility called shred. Open a terminal window by clicking on Applications at the top-left of the screen, then expanding the Accessories menu and clicking on Terminal. Navigate to the file that you want to delete using cd to change directories and ls to list the files and folders in the current directory. As an example, we’ve got a file called BankInfo.txt on a Windows NTFS-formatted hard drive. We want to delete it securely, so we’ll call shred by entering the following in the terminal window: shred <file> which is, in our example: shred BankInfo.txt Notice that our BankInfo.txt file still exists, even though we’ve shredded it. A quick look at the contents of BankInfo.txt make it obvious that the file has indeed been securely overwritten. We can use some command-line arguments to make shred delete the file from the hard drive as well. We can also be extra-careful about the shredding process by upping the number of times shred overwrites the original file. To do this, in the terminal, type in: shred –remove –iterations=<num> <file> By default, shred overwrites the file 25 times. We’ll double this, giving us the following command: shred –remove –iterations=50 BankInfo.txt BankInfo.txt has now been securely wiped on the physical disk, and also no longer shows up in the directory listing. Repeat this process for any sensitive files on your hard drive! Wipe entire hard drives If you’re disposing of an old hard drive, or giving it to someone else, then you might instead want to wipe your entire hard drive. shred can be invoked on hard drives, but on modern file systems, the shred process may be reversible. We’ll use the program wipe to securely delete all of the data on a hard drive. Unlike shred, wipe is not included in Ubuntu by default, so we have to install it. Open up the Synaptic Package Manager by clicking on System in the top-left corner of the screen, then expanding the Administration folder and clicking on Synaptic Package Manager. wipe is part of the Universe repository, which is not enabled by default. We’ll enable it by clicking on Settings > Repositories in the Synaptic Package Manager window. Check the checkbox next to “Community-maintained Open Source software (universe)”. Click Close. You’ll need to reload Synaptic’s package list. Click on the Reload button in the main Synaptic Package Manager window. Once the package list has been reloaded, the text over the search field will change to “Rebuilding search index”. Wait until it reads “Quick search,” and then type “wipe” into the search field. The wipe package should come up, along with some other packages that perform similar functions. Click on the checkbox to the left of the label “wipe” and select “Mark for Installation”. Click on the Apply button to start the installation process. Click the Apply button on the Summary window that pops up. Once the installation is done, click the Close button and close the Synaptic Package Manager window. Open a terminal window by clicking on Applications in the top-left of the screen, then Accessories > Terminal. You need to figure our the correct hard drive to wipe. If you wipe the wrong hard drive, that data will not be recoverable, so exercise caution! In the terminal window, type in: sudo fdisk -l A list of your hard drives will show up. A few factors will help you identify the right hard drive. One is the file system, found in the System column of  the list – Windows hard drives are usually formatted as NTFS (which shows up as HPFS/NTFS). Another good identifier is the size of the hard drive, which appears after its identifier (highlighted in the following screenshot). In our case, the hard drive we want to wipe is only around 1 GB large, and is formatted as NTFS. We make a note of the label found under the the Device column heading. If you have multiple partitions on this hard drive, then there will be more than one device in this list. The wipe developers recommend wiping each partition separately. To start the wiping process, type the following into the terminal: sudo wipe <device label> In our case, this is: sudo wipe /dev/sda1 Again, exercise caution – this is the point of no return! Your hard drive will be completely wiped. It may take some time to complete, depending on the size of the drive you’re wiping. Conclusion If you have sensitive information on your hard drive – and chances are you probably do – then it’s a good idea to securely delete sensitive files before you give away or dispose of your hard drive. The most secure way to delete your data is with a few swings of a hammer, but shred and wipe from a Ubuntu Live CD is a good alternative! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Reset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CDScan a Windows PC for Viruses from a Ubuntu Live CDRecover Deleted Files on an NTFS Hard Drive from a Ubuntu Live CDCreate a Bootable Ubuntu 9.10 USB Flash DriveCreate a Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive the Easy Way 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 DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Office 2010 Product Guides Google Maps Place marks – Pizza, Guns or Strip Clubs Monitor Applications With Kiwi LocPDF is a Visual PDF Search Tool Download Free iPad Wallpapers at iPad Decor Get Your Delicious Bookmarks In Firefox’s Awesome Bar

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• 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.

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• 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?

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• 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

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• 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?

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• 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?

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• Save GMail attachments directly to Google Drive

  - by Gopinath

  What makes Google Drive attractive is it ability to play nice with other Google offerings like Google Docs, GMail, Android mobiles & tablets. Google Drive is well integrated with Google Docs and every document you create is automatically saved on Google Drive. Google Drive’s integration with other services like GMail may be in progress at Google, but enthusiastic community developers has released a plugin to integrate with GMail. The Google Chrome plugin “Gmail Attachments To Drive” lets you automatically save GMail attachments to Google Drive with a single click. Once the plugin is installed it adds a link “Save To Drive” next to each attachment displayed on GMail and on clicking, it automatically saves the files to Google Drive. I tested the plugin by saving attachments like PDFs, MS Word documents and Images to Google Drive and it worked very well.  I don’t have any complaints on the plugin except couple of feature requests. If the plugin can provide option “Save All Files To Drive” it will be very much helpful to save all attachment of an email at one shot. Also it would be great if the developer can extend it to Firefox too. Anyways it’s a great plugin for Google Drive users and worth checking it out. Install Gmail Attachments To Drive for Google Chrome

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• Move smaller hard drive to partition on a larger hard drive

  - by bluejeansummer

  My parents bought a new hard drive for a laptop that I've owned for several years. It's much larger than the current one, so I plan on splitting it up to dual boot it with Ubuntu. I have no problem with partitioning a drive (I always keep a LiveCD handy), but my question is this: how can I go about moving the existing partition to the new drive? This is a laptop, so I can't simply plug the new drive into another slot. Also, even if I manage to move it, will Windows still work on the new drive in a larger partition? I've had this laptop for quite a while, and I've lost the recovery discs that came with it a long time ago. I also have a lot of software without CDs to reinstall them with. This makes not reinstalling Windows a high priority. In case it helps, both drives use 2.5" PATA, and I have a 1 TB external drive available if it's needed.

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• Create folder and insert file in Google Drive

  - by web_student

  I am trying to create a new folder in Drive and upload one (or more) files to that created folder. I use the code below, but the result is that both the folder and the file are placed in the root of my Drive. $client->setAccessToken($_SESSION['accessToken']); //create folder $folder_mime = "application/vnd.google-apps.folder"; $folder_name = 'New Folder'; $service = new Google_DriveService($client); $folder = new Google_DriveFile(); $folder->setTitle($folder_name); $folder->setMimeType($folder_mime); $service->files->insert($folder); //upload file $file_name = $_FILES["uploadFile"]["name"]; $file_mime = $_FILES["uploadFile"]["type"]; $file_path = $_FILES["uploadFile"]["tmp_name"]; $service = new Google_DriveService($client); $file = new Google_DriveFile(); $file->setParents(array($folder_name)); $file->setTitle($file_name); $file->setDescription('This is a '.$file_mime.' document'); $file->setMimeType($file_mime); $service->files->insert( $file, array( 'data' => file_get_contents($file_path) ) );

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• Everything on hard drive suddenly vanished without explanation, but the drive seems otherwise functional

  - by user160705

  Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Custom-built desktop I have a new desktop that I built a few months ago that has a four-year-old WD hard drive and a two-year-old drive. I had set it up so that the newer drive had Windows and most of my files on it while the older drive had my music library, some movies and games, and a backup of all of my documents. About a month ago, I installed some new case fans and, in the process, I temporarily unplugged my hard drive (while the computer was off of course - I took all the necessary precautions) for wire management. I plugged it back in, and didn't really think anything of it. At around that time, however, I noticed that my older hard drive wasn't showing up in Windows Explorer anymore but I didn't really have time to check into it (I had just started college) and I'm finally getting a chance to now. That drive doesn't show up in Windows Explorer at all but it does show up in Disk Management. That screen shows the following: http://puu.sh/17mMN Any idea what happened? Is there any way to recover my files? Thanks in advance for your help! EDIT: The music and games and stuff used to be on "Disc 1", the 465.71 GB of what is now showing as unallocated space.

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• Will Windows fail activation on a new hard drive after previous hard drive failed

  - by ServerBloke

  I have a failing hard drive which won't boot, that has Windows 7 Home Premium installed. I have a replacement hard drive on the way. My question is will I run into problems trying to install Windows 7 using the same cdkey and DVD on the new hard drive? I assume activation will find that the cdkey has already been activated and fail, especially if a hardware ID is checked which will probably be different because even though the other hardware is the same, the hard drive will be different.

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• Is it possible that solid state drives (or any faster drive) will make common applications faster even if they are cached?

  - by leladax

  I assumed that solid state drives are insignificant after, say, Firefox is fully brought up and no important disk activity after that is going on. However, I wonder if some kind of 'cached from the disk to the CPU' activity is going on that may make solid state drives (or any faster drive) better. Then again, I suspect that may be depended only on the Bus (or some kind of cache memory drives have). Hrm..

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• External hard drive issue

  - by Blind Fish

  I am running Ubuntu 12.04 and I have a 500GB external hard drive, formatted in ext4, which I have used for about a year to store batches of data that I am sifting through. About once a week I move a chunk of data from the external drive to my internal drive for processing. As I do that I delete the data from the external drive and empty the trash, thereby clearing up space on the external and also preventing myself from grabbing stuff that I've already sorted through. The vast majority of this is text files, but there are a few .jpegs and .mp4s thrown in, if that matters. Anyway, this has been working without a hitch for nearly a year. So today I plug in the drive and I have an odd issue. I was able to move folders from the external over to my internal drive with no problem, but when I tried to delete those files I was unable to do so. I kept getting the "unable to send file to trash, do you wish to delete permanently?" message. I clicked yes / delete all, but no files were actually deleted. It just sat there. Even worse, while the system was trying in vain to delete those files I was unable to move more files over. In short, I was stuck. I canceled the operation, unmounted and remounted the drive, and then I had an even bigger problem. I have a spreadsheet of all the different folders on there ( exactly 818 ) and yet when I opened the drive in Nautilus, it was only finding 512 folders. So I had 306 missing folders, but my free space was unchanged. Immediately I think that the drive may be corrupted. I went into Disk Utility and ran the check disk option. It said that the drive was NOT clean, but offered no remedy or option to repair. I went back into the drive in Nautilus and once again attempted to delete the files I had already moved. Same issue. I clicked on Details and it said that it was unable to create a trashing file I/O error. I've looked, and it's not a permissions issue. The drive and all folders that are in it all belong to me, and they are all read / write. I've started running badblocks on the drive, but it looks like that is going to take several hours to complete. Any ideas?

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