HD Doctor Blog

If your drive came with two jumpers and your setting only calls for one,
you can place the extra jumper horizontally accross the top row for storage.

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Most laptop computers are designed to give the owner the ability to replace the internal hard disc drive. The computer usually has an access cover or door on the bottom side of the system.  There are systems that are not designed for user access.  Sometimes these systems have warnings about voiding the system warranty.  Be sure to study your system’s documentation to learn about upgrade policies and methods.

Like desktop computers, laptop computers have one of two possible hard disc drive interface: SATA and ATA (also called IDE or PATA).  The type of hard drive you select must…

Due to the increased speed, size and quantity of devices in many PCs the system can be very vulnerable to electronic noise on the data lines. This may in fact be the cause of your particular problem. Symptoms of electronic noise can include the following:

• Slow performance.
• Drive not detected in BIOS.
• Drive detected incorrectly in BIOS, with nonsense (garbage) figures (e.g. $0&*?%2).
• Drive shown on boot up with an engineering name instead of model number (e.g. Millennium).
• You may receive invalid error codes with the SeaTools diagnostics utility. 

In order…

When upgrading to a larger capacity drive, the main thing to consider is whether or not your computer is capable of addressing the extra capacity provided by the larger drive. If the system is several years old this is especially true.

Here are some common thresholds for capacity limitations:

• 2.1 GigaBytes
• 8.4 GigaBytes
• 32 GigaBytes
• 137 GigaBytes
• 2 Terabytes

As an example, if you have an 80 GigaByte (GB) drive, and are considering upgrading to a 160 GB drive, it would be wise to verify that your system BIOS (Basic…

When you attempt to remove a partition using the FDISK utility that is included with Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, or Windows Me, you may receive the error message "Cannot delete Extended DOS Partition while logical drives exist".

However, when you attempt to remove a logical drive in the extended DOS partition from within the FDISK utility, you may receive the error message "No Logical Drives defined".
This behavior occurs if the extended DOS partition is an NTFS partition. This behavior can also occur if the partition has been created with a third-party operating…

The following methods can help determine what kind of hard disk you have inside your computer.

1. Seatools For Windows

Seatools for Windows can detect all hard drives connected to your computer.

2. Device Manager

a) Users running Microsoft 2000, XP, or Vista

Microsoft Windows users can easily determine the type of hard drive that is currently installed in their computer by following the below steps.

1. Right click on "My Computer".
2. Select "Manage".
3. Click on "Device Manager" in the list on the left.
4. Select the "Disk Drives" entry.

Note: This will…

ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) refers to a common standard used to connect hard drives and other storage devices to a motherboard. It is also referred to as IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics), though the terms are not technically interchangeable. Ultra ATA is simply next generation ATA with improved transfer speed and architecture. There are several buzzwords surrounding Ultra ATA that can make it a little confusing for consumers, but each buzzword refers to an aspect of the standard that forms the overall architecture of Ultra ATA.

Ultra ATA/100 use the new Ultra DMA mode 5, supporting interface transfers at 100…

What is a GPT disk?
The GUID Partition Table (GPT) was introduced as part of the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) initiative. GPT provides a more flexible mechanism for partitioning disks than the older Master Boot Record (MBR) partitioning scheme that has been common to PCs.

A partition is a contiguous space of storage on a physical or logical disk that functions as though it were a physically separate disk. Partitions are visible to the system firmware and the installed operating systems. Access to a partition is controlled by the system firmware before the system boots the operating…

Discrepancy Between Reported Capacity and Actual Capacity
Many users are confused when their operating system reports, for example, that their new ST31000340AS 1 Terabyte  (1000 GB) hard drive is reporting only about 909 Gbytes in "usable capacity". Several factors may come into play when you see the reported capacity of a disc drive. Unfortunately there are two different number systems which are used to express units of storage capacity;

• Binary – which says that a kilobyte is equal to 1024 bytes
• Decimal – which says that a kilobyte is equal to 1000 bytes.

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What does "Low Level Formatting" mean?

Actually the term "low level" is a bit of a misnomer. The low-level process first used years ago in MFM hard drives bears little resemblance to what we now call a "low-level format" for today’s SATA and ATA (IDE) drives. The only safe method of initializing all the data on a Seagate device is the Zero Fill erase option in SeaTools for DOS. This is a simple process of writing all zeros (0′s) to the entire hard disk drive.

Why would I want to Zero Fill my drive?

The most common reasons…