Computer viruses are one of the greatest the threats that cause laptop hard drives to crash. This is possible because viruses affect the sectors of the storage device logically and actually cause a serious damage to it. Once this happens, the laptop starts having some unexplainable complications.
Posts Tagged ‘Storage Device’
Viruses Causing Laptops to Crash – How?
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009Computer Forensics Explained
Monday, July 6th, 2009Computer forensics and mobile phone forensics is not about processing data; but about investigating people and their actions in relation to a computer or other electronic data processing or storage device. Therefore looking to find and use information about what has happened to data as evidence to pinpoint fraudulent, dishonest or deceptive behaviour in individuals.
Windows 2000 Disk Defragmenter Tool Issues
Monday, June 29th, 2009A hard disk may get highly fragmented as files are regularly deleted and created by users. Thus to overcome the issue, Microsoft Windows includes Disk Defragmenter utility. The tool can place fragmented files on contiguous locations on the storage device.
Always Keep a Boot Floppy Handy for Hard Drive Recovery
Saturday, June 20th, 2009Lison Joseph is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the best online backup tool — Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/always-keep-a-boot-floppy-handy-for-hard-drive-recovery.html
Expect the unexpected, as far as hard drive recovery is concerned
Well you have absolutely no idea when you might need a hard drive recovery because of a belligerent hard disk going south on you! One fine morning when you boot up, your BIOS might just refuse to detect the hard drive. These things happen for no apparent reason and the only thing you as a computer user can do is to be prepared. This does not mean that all users should prepare against all the permutations and combination of ways in which their system can hang up.
However, there are a few basic things that every user can and ideally should do. One such is to have a clean bootable floppy ready, always.
Bootable floppy in the context of hard drive recovery
Well, In the first place, if you do not know what a bootable floppy is, then it is high time you learnt more about what is the process of booting and what are the different ways in which it can be done. For starters, booting is the process of detecting all the hardware and loading all the required operating system files when the computer is first powered up.
There are several ways of booting, like from the hard drive (as is usually done) or from a CD or even from a floppy drive. Booting from devices other than a hard drive is usually necessitated by a non-functioning primary boot device (read hard drive). So a bootable floppy is the first thing you are going to need if you want to get into your system and take a peek at the hard disk to determine what is ailing your storage device and then decide on your hard drive recovery strategy.
You might be wondering how a system knows where to boot from when the power is switched on. It is here, the BIOS comes into picture. The BIOS has information about boot procedure and you can manually configure this to set a boot procedure of your choice. For example, you can set it first, seek the hard drive and if it fails, then try to boot from the CD drive and if that too fails, then seek the floppy drive. So even to start contemplating hard drive recovery, you should be comfortable finding your way around various SETUP options in BIOS.
So how do you make a bootable floppy, the first step towards hard drive recovery!
Frankly, it is quite simple. In most windows versions you can do a search in Windows Help with string, “boot floppy” or “startup disk” and you will get the exact procedure for making an MS DOS start up disk. If you are well versed with DOS, then all you need to do is insert the floppy disk and use the format command on the floppy drive. Do not forget to use the “/s” switch so that the required system files are copied after a quick format.
Now that you have a boot floppy is ready, you are better prepared to face a hard drive recovery scenario!
Why Should a Small Business Spend Time and Money on Data Backups?
Monday, June 8th, 2009Andrew Whitehead is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the popular Amazon S3 based online backup solution — Back2zip. This article is also at http://free-backup.info/small-business-spend-time-money-data-backups.html
What is a Data Backup and Why is It Necessary?
Data backup is as important as the data you store on your system; if that holds valuable information critical to the daily operation of your business, then making a backup of it is also critical. Think about the customer information, supplier details, debtors & creditors, etc. stored on your hard drive, and then imagine that one morning you can no longer find them.
Backups are for your peace of mind, and to save you a lot of time and money if anything terminal happens to your data files. Your data is fundamental to the operation of your business, and should be valued as an important asset.
Any backup is basically copying your data files to disk or some other storage device, to provide a working copy of your data ready to be restored if the original copy is lost, damaged, or corrupted. This can can occur in a surprising number of ways – viruses, power failures, power spikes (these may not even be noticed! ), system crashes, external events such as flood, fire, theft, or vandalism , or even a simple user error.
A Sample Data Backup Procedure
How often you make a data backup depends on how frequently the data changes, the value you place on the information, its importance to your business, and the cost of replacing or recreating it. If you consider that your data file is too important to lose, or that it would be costly to replace, then you must backup regularly.
If you open and update your data files every day, you should set aside a labeled disk/tape for each day of the week and make a backup everday. The following week, when you next enter the backup file name, you will be prompted to overwrite or append the previous weeks file. If you overwrite, you will then be in a weekly cycle. If you are confident that you will always have space on the media, you can append and have a two weekly cycle.
If you feel your information doesn’t alter that frequently, you can backup once a week and rotate disks on that basis – Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, back to Week 1 again.
The ultimate system is to keep buying new media, backing up daily and working on a very long (6 monthly or more) cycle. This is to ensure that there is always a clean backup if a fault goes unnoticed for any length of time, but it is really overkill for a small business.
Don’t Forget to Check That Your Data Backup Has Worked!
Don’t be misled into thinking that because you have run a backup that it has worked, there are numerous horror stories of PC users suddenly needing to restore and only then finding out that their backup procedure has been routinely failing. You should regularly test the backup media to confirm that the data has been successfully backing up.
Don’t put off learning how to recover files until disaster strikes. Practice to familiarize yourself with the process and make this a regular event, especially after any upgrades or changes.
