HarDisk.Info

Everything you wanted to know about Disk cloning - the advantages, best practices and available software.

DI reader Vinod Nair is searching for a tool to create a mirror replica of his hard-drive that can easily restore all program files, documents, data and other custom settings in the event of a hard-disk crash.

Vinod knows that popular disk backup and cloning software like Acronis True Image 9 or Norton Ghost 10 already exist but he finds them too expensive and is on a hunt for a cheap or free alternative. Read more

Disk formatting is the process of preparing a hard disk or other storage medium for use, including setting up an empty file system. A variety of utilities and programs exist for this task; pictured to the right is the iconic FORMAT.COM of MS-DOS and PC-DOS.

Large disks can be partitioned, divided into logical sections that are formatted with their own file systems. This is normally only done on hard disks because of the small sizes of other disk types, as well as compatibility issues.

A corrupted operating system can be reverted to a clean state by formatting the disk and reinstalling the OS, as a drastic way of combatting a software problem or malware infection. Obviously, important files should be backed up beforehand.

SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) is a set of ANSI standards for connecting devices to computer systems. The vast majority of SCSI devices are data storage devices.
Standard SCSI is a parallel technology, but many serial SCSI variants exist, including FireWire and Fibre Channel.

SCSI is generally considered a higher-end alternative to IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics). A single IDE controller can control two drives. A single SCI controller can control 8 or 16 drives. In addition, SCSI usually offers greater cable length and higher length than IDE.

Problem of Bad Sector

While running your computer, you may receive error messages suggesting your hard disk might contain bad sectors. The errors are typically flagged as “CRC” or “Cyclic Redundancy Error”. Some of your data files are missing, unreadable or corrupted and it takes forever or impossible to access certain files and folders. This may be a cause of bad sector problems. Sectors are pie-sliced divisions of a hard disk. And a bad sector is a sector on the disk which data cannot be written or read due to a physical damage or inconsistencies of parity checking bits on disk. Any data that is written or stored on that area is likely to be lost or corrupted. Data residing on the rest of the disk may be unaffected and the disk is considerably usable if the bad sectors are few.
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