Disk

Wow! Today is a great day I thought I missed my iTunes library and outlook email but I managed to recover it. I’m not really sure how it happened. All began when I moved my old 60GB hard disk to another PC as an extra disk (not boot disk). The other PC had Windows XP installed in its main 250Gb hard disk. I didn’t notice at first but the BIOS didn’t recognized the 60GB disk correctly (wrong size, wrong id) and when I started the Disk Administrator in Windows, it warned me that the disk had’nt a signature and asked me to write a new one. I clicked OK and I think that screwed up the whole disk. As I found later, it ended up with a corrupted MBR and NTFS bootsector. I decided to reboot to see BIOS messages about the disk and now I noticed that size was wrong, etc. I changed the IDE cable (weird cabling problem), rebooted and now the size was ok but I couldn’t mount it in Windows, it didn’t recognized it as a NTFS volume. ...

Diskeeper and PerfectDisk are main leading Windows defragmenting tools in the market. The hard disk in my Windows XP machine is heavily fragmented and the MS built-in defragmenter doesn’t help very much so I decide to take a look into the commercial defragmenter tools out there. First I tried Diskeeper because I found that the Windows built-in defragmentation tool contains code licensed from Executive Software (the makers of Diskeeper). I thought that being licensed by Microsoft was a good sign but… Diskeeper like the built-in tool is a multi-pass defragmenter. That means that if you run it one time (or two or three for that matter) the hard drive will not end fully defragmented. You need to execute it periodically over a long term to end up with a fully defragmented drive. And it doesn’t consolidates free space. Diskeeper says that those two things are not important because drive performance is not affected. Doing it that way they consume less resources which is good but I found very frustrating to execute a defragmenter and end up with a slightly less fragmented disk I want a full defragmentation now!. ...