Hard Drive Boot Sector Fix

The boot sector on your hard drive is a file called the Master Boot Record (MBR for short). This sector of the hard drive is a major part of the computer's boot process, and without it, your operating system cannot successfully boot. If the MBR is corrupted by a virus or deleted through user error, you can fix it by using your operating system installation CD.

1. Turn on your computer, insert your installation CD, restart the computer and wait for the "Press any key to boot from CD" message to appear." Press any key on your keyboard as soon as you see this message.
2. Press "R" once the welcome menu appears and wait for the Recovery Console to load.
3. Log in to your operating system by pressing "1," pressing "Enter," typing in your Administrator password and pressing "Enter."
4. Type "fixmbr" in the Recovery Console window and press the "Enter" key. If you are asked to confirm the command, type "yes" and press "Enter."

Restart the computer and allow it to boot normally by typing "exit" and pressing "Enter."

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Advantages and Disadvantages of External hard disk drives

Advantages and Disadvantages of External hard disk drives

External drives are arguably the biggest growth area in data storage of recent times. They offer the possibility of a readily transportable repository for all a user’s valuable data, documents, photographs, music and movies. Alternatively they can provide a destination for a user to backup their valued files to, in case the data held on their internal storage is lost, or the internal storage fails. But are they lulling users into a false sense of security?

They are being offered with ever increasing capacity and at ever decreasing prices. Many are advertised using ‘pence per Gigabyte’ prices as a lure. However a few notes of caution arise from the recent spate of external hard drives being sent for Data Recovery.

·        Unlike the internal hard drive in your PC, which is held securely in a rarely moved case, external drives are being carried about from place to place and as a result they get dropped, knocked, crushed and subject to all manner of abuse and trauma.

·        They have trailing power and/or data cables that only too easily serve to pull them over, drag them off desks or otherwise expose them to further risk.

·        Unlike the hard drive in your PC or Laptop, which is cooled by a fan, external drives seldom have cooling fans and, in an effort to make them as small as possible, the hard drive(s) inside rarely have much free air space around them. This can result in overheating with the attendant problems that causes.

·        External drives are an excellent destination for backing up files, but this only truly safeguards your data if the files are initially saved to an internal drive and then backed up to the external. If the external becomes the default place for files to be saved to, the data is not being backed up, it is simply being saved to a destination where it is more likely to be lost.

The hard drives found inside externals are no less likely to fail than an internal drive. Indeed where the drives inside an external are invisible to the user and perhaps chosen to keep costs low, might they be more likely to fail even without the extra risks highlighted above? Where external drives carry extended warranties, this might seem reassuring, but remember, the warranty will only cover repair or replacement of the drive, not the cost of recovering any valuable data stored on it.

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Printer goes offline on reboot

On reboot computer, the printer in Windows 7 XP mode goes offline

1). In Control Panel, Printers, delete offline printers. If they wont delete, it may be because there are pending print jobs in the queue. Open the printer and Cancel the jobs..

 

2). In Printer properties, Ports tab, delete the previously installed printers (offline status) that appear as Client Side Rendering Provider under the Description column.

To do this, highlight the port, then click on Delete Port button. Click Apply.

3). Restart your PC.

4). Now reinstall the printers as follows:

         1). Open Control panel, Printers, and click Add a printer.

         2). Click Add a local printer.

         3). Select the "Use an existing port" radio button, and select LPT1: (Printer Port). Click Next.

        4). Install the printer driver. Mine were found in the list inlcuded with Vista. Select the manufacturer and the printer. Click Next.

          5). In the next window, accept the printer name or type in a new name. Leave the "Set as default printer" box unchecked. Click Next.

5). Vista should now install the printer. A window should open saying "You've successfully added printer name.

6). DO NOT Print a test page at this time, because nothing is connected to the LPT1 port on the laptop. Just press Finish. The printer you just added should appear in the Printers window.

7). Click ONCE on the newly added printer to highlight it, then right-click and open Properties.

8). On the Ports tab, click Add Port “select Local Port, then click New Port”

9). When the Port Name window open, Enter a port name as follows: \computername\printername (replace computername with the name of your PC acting as print server, and printername with the name of your printer). Click OK.

10). You should now have a new port listed on the Ports tab of the printer Properties, but now the Description should be Local Port, instead of Client Side Rendering Provider. Click OK.

11). Now you can go to the General tab, and Print a Test Page.

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Partition External Hard Drive

Partition External Hard Drive

Most of the external hard drives come with one preformatted partition ready to use. But if it didn't, or if you don't like the default setup, changing it is easy. And of course you'll want to do this before you load that disk up with data.

Start by Right clicking on My Computer and then clicking on Manage. In the resulting application window, click on Disk Management in the left hand pane. You should see something similar to this:

At the top you'll see all the logical disks on your system listed alphabetically by label by default. Below that you'll see a graphical representation of all the physical disk drives known to your system. If a physical drive has more than one partition those partitions will be shown together on the single physical drive.

In this example, my drive "E:" is an external USB drive. It happens to be my backup drive where nightly backups are stored.

Remove the Existing Partition

Let's assume for a moment that I'm unhappy with the current configuration of the partitions on my external drive and want to change it. My first step would be to remove the existing partition.

You need to right click on the drive in the lower pane, and you should see this menu:

Important: the next step will delete everything on the drive. Make sure this is what you want before proceeding.

Click on Delete Partition

The representation of the drive should change from "Healthy" to "Unallocated".

Partition the Drive

Right click on the drive again, and the option that was once "Delete Partition" is now "New Partition". Click on that to set up your new partition.

You'll then be asked to select "Primary" or "Extended" partition. Primary is sufficient unless you plan to put more than 4 partitions on this hard disk. You'll then also be asked how much of the space to allocate for the new partition you're creating.

Typically, I recommend simply allocating the entire space to a single partition. You can, if you like, allocate less than the maximum space to the partition you're creating now so that you have room for additional partitions on the same hard disk. Remember that each partition, once formatted, will appear as its own logical disk (C:, D:, E: and so on.)

You'll then be asked about formatting, which I'll cover below.

Once you've formatted the new partition, it'll appear as "Healthy", and any leftover space will continue to display "Unallocated". You can then repeat this partitioning process on that unallocated space until your entire drive has been allocated.

Format the Drive

Assuming that partitioning has been performed above, or you don't want to change the partitioning of your drive, the next thing to change would be the format of the drive.

Important: formatting a drive will delete everything on the drive. Make sure this is what you want before proceeding.

Right click on the drive that you wish to format, click on the Format item, press OK on the dire warning, and you'll get a dialog similar to this:

Let's look at each of those options:

·         Volume Label - is the name that will appear when the logical disk is displayed in Windows Explorer, in File selection dialog boxes and in other situations. It's a convenient way to identify disks by name rather than only by letter. The label is an attribute of the drive, so particularly on removable drives the label stays the same no matter what machine you plug it into, or what drive letter it gets assigned.

·         File System - I recommend NTFS unless the drive is going to be used by older versions of Windows, or by non-Windows systems. There's debate as to whether NTFS is faster (I think it is), but it also supports additional security features like file permissions, and can typically make more efficient use of larger disks.

·         Allocation unit size - can be left at "Default".

·         Perform a Quick format - for the type of format we're doing here, I actually recommend leaving this unchecked. A quick format only writes the bare minimum of information to establish the disk's new configuration. If the disk has been in use for a while, that's fine and is what I typically recommend. However, when going through the effort of formatting a new disk I suggest using this opportunity to have the format process actually write the entire drive. It may take a while.

·         Enable file and folder compression - I have mixed feelings about this. The overhead of compressing and decompressing files is no longer significant with today's processor speeds. However I have concerns about data recovery if the disk ever experiences an issue. My concerns may not be valid, but ultimately, I never run with compression on any of my hard disks, preferring instead to compress the individual files as appropriate instead. So many file formats, like most audio and video files, are already compressed that the compression offered by the file system is often negligible. I leave this unchecked.

That's it. Press OK and after a period of time you'll have a formatted, ready-to-use disk.

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