HD Doctor Blog

The post consists of programs for making duplicate copies of your computer files, digital photos, music, movies, or anything else on your hard drive or portable device that you’d like to duplicate in case of accident or catastrophe.

1. Paragon Backup & Recovery Free Edition (32 bit)
Back up and restore your Windows system.

Paragon Backup & Recovery 10.2 Free Edition – a disaster recovery tool for stand-alone Windows-based PCs. Combining all the existing backup techniques and exclusive recovery environments, this latest edition satisfies the needs of even the most demanding user and…

Pandora Recovery
Find, preview and restore permanently deleted files.
Operating system: Windows 2000/XP/Vista

Pandora Recovery is a powerful free tool that provides its users an effective way to attempt recovery of permanently deleted files. And that does not mean restoration of a file from Recycle Bin. The software recovers files removed from Recycle Bin, deleted using Shift + Delete keys bypassing Recycle Bin and files deleted from DOS prompt. Pandora Recovery lets its user browse, search, preview and recover files deleted from NTFS and FAT volumes, supporting hard drives, flash drives and memory cards. It successfully handles…

exFAT (Extended File Allocation Table) is a file system designed and patentend by Microsoft and released in all versions of Windows, starting with Windows Server 2008. In addition Microsoft has released an update for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, to add support for exFAT formatted drives.

exFAT is considered the successor to the FAT16 and FAT32 file systems. exFAT has a number of advantages and disadvantages over NTFS and FAT32. It has a theoretical maximum disk size up to 64 ZB (Zettabytes) or 64 billion terabytes, versus a 32 GB maximum under a FAT32 partition. It also allows…

A hard drive can be divided into primary and extended partitions. Partitions function as physically separate storage units. This allows you to separate different types of information, such as user data on one partition and applications on another. A hard drive can contain up to four primary partitions, or up to three primary partitions and one extended partition, for a maximum of four partitions.

There can be only one extended partition on a hard disk, so you should include all remaining free space in the extended partition. Unlike primary partitions, you don’t format extended partitions or assign drive letters…

The BIOS is a program pre-installed on computers (with the exception of Macs) that the computer uses to start up. The CPU accesses the BIOS before the operating system is loaded. The BIOS then checks all your hardware connections and locates all of your devices. If everything is OK, the BIOS loads the operating system into the computer’s memory and finishes the boot-up process.

Some of the most common single key commands are:

F1, F2, ESC and DEL.

Some of the most common key combinations are:

CTRL+ALT+ESC, CTRL+ALT+DEL, or CTRL+ALT+INS.

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ALR Advanced Logic Research,…

When NOT to use Alternate Jumper Settings:

    * If you are running Windows 2000/XP/Vista.

    * If the system can boot with just one jumper on the drive without locking up.

    * If the drive is installed on an IDE controller card that is providing support to access the full drive capacity.

When to use Alternate Jumper Settings
The most common scenario when a drive should be configured with the Alternate Jumper Settings is when the system hangs up or freezes upon boot up after auto-detecting all IDE devices. The reason for this…

Western Digital manufactures desktop edition hard drives and RAID Edition hard drives. Each type of hard drive is designed to work specifically as a stand-alone drive, or in a multi-drive RAID environment.

If you install and use a desktop edition hard drive connected to a RAID controller, the drive may not work correctly. This is caused by the normal error recovery procedure that a desktop edition hard drive uses.

Note: There are a few cases where the manufacturer of the RAID controller have designed their drives to work with specific model Desktop drives. If this is the case you…

1. PAYAM Data Recovery Pty Ltd
http://www.payam.com.au
Data recovery services for faulty hard disk drives in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia.
Level 10, 379 Queen Street, Brisbane, QLD, 4000.
Phone: (07) 3221 5988

2. Technetics Data Recovery
http://www.techneticsdata.com.au
The data recovery labs in Australia with many years of experience in the industry.
Level 1, 71 Palmerston Crescent
South Melbourne VIC 3205
Melbourne Australia
Phone: 1300 853 453

3. DATA DETECT Pty Ltd
http://www.datadetect.com.au
Recovers data from hard disk drives, digital media and RAID systems in Australia.
Suite…

DOS and DOS based programs like Windows 3.x and Windows 95 cannot access drives over 1024 cylinders on their own, but require third party assistance to use large hard drives. SCSI drives handle this with drivers built in to the SCSI controller, so we will limit this discussion to ATA hard drives. There are several methods used to overcome the cylinder limitation, and all of them involve translation.

A translation scheme converts information from one form to another and back again. Think of it like this: If you go to a foreign country to conduct business and you don’t…

Yes, with the following recommendations:

Never unplug any eSATA, 1394, or USB device that is being actively accessed by the operating system (such as during a file copy).

• Unplugging a device while it is being used may result in a system crash and the loss of the ability to recover the data already written to the drive.
• For Macintosh – If you want to unplug an External Drive you must first drag the mounted drive icon to the trash to dismount it. After the drive is dismounted then it can be unplugged.
  For Windows – If

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