Just installed XP on a really old computer, which was previously running Windows ME (yes, we're really pushing towards cutting edge here). It's being done for a friend who wants to keep making use of an older computer. It's a P3-500Mhz, which I would guess is a machine from circa 1998/1999....

I would like to burn my DVDs with UDF format rather than the ISO-Jolliet. However my burning program(s) ask me which UDF version I would like to use in detail and offers me: 1.02 1.50 2.00 2.01 2.50 2.60

I have a dying drive on an IBM Transnote which has no CD drive (and needless to say I have no restore discs). It still works and Maxtor's quick check tells me that it is OK but it is on the way out DEFINITELY. Hitachi DFT reports excessive disk shock and doesnt seem to care that the drive still...

Hello.... I had a USB memory stick plugged into my Win XP (pro) computer. The machine then updated itself with the many various MS patches going back a number of weeks. This it successfully did. After a reboot, I found that the USB device was no longer available (or the files on it) as xp...

In general, do disk defragmenters for Windows XP perform a file system integrity check (like XP's CHKDSK) before they start moving data around? I'm thinking of defraggers like Diskeeper and PerfectDisk as well as XP's own defragger.

I suppose this could be a general post about any HD, but the drive in question is a SATA. We had a SATA installed on a computer that may have been infected with a virus, and in order to use it again, we need wipe the drive clean. Do WD drives come with diagnostic programs that will do a low...

I'm wondering about the AC power converters supplied with USB enclosures as I want to use an enclosure internationaly. Do most enclosures come with a converter that can be used with different voltages/freqs? Thanx

Here is a screenshot out of an Asus motherboard manual (page 59): http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/SATA1_ST320413A.jpg Something seems wrong about it ... Asus M2N-X manual: http://dlsvr04.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/socketAM2/M2N-X/e3147_m2n-x.pdf - Franc Zabkar --

On Tue, 20 Oct 2009 07:00:41 +1100, Franc Zabkar put finger to keyboard and composed: I've found quite a few more SSD & CompactFlash SMART attributes, with descriptions: http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/SSD_CF_attribs.txt - Franc Zabkar --

Say that I have a system with a SATA drive, and it's running XP, and the drive was formatted as NTFS, and in the BIOS I have my SATA drive being controlled by the on-board SATA controller. Hypothetically, if in the bios I changed the configuration such that my SATA drive was being emulated as an...

I was sitting at my desk yesterday during a storm when there was a split-second power outage. Despite the fact that my battery shows all 5 lights lit, the computer died. Is there a better brand to use than APC? Can the battery be sub-par even though the test lights say it is OK? What have...

Hi guys, Apologies if this isn't the right place to ask this, but I need help with my broken 500GB drive. It is partitioned into 2 and the first partition clicks. When I did manage to access the drive using a Ubuntu memory stick the second partition seemed to read perfectly without clicking,...

AIUI ... a bad sector on an IDE hard drive gets labelled as unusable in the drive's map and a substitute sector is found. The user wouldn't know about it because this happens transparently. If there are LOTS of bad sectors then couldn't we have a situation where the drive's performance is poor...

Hello! Am I understanding correctly that these terms are basically the same? If so, then why did my client's updated Windows 2000 SP4's chkdsk (/r /f parameters and rebooted to run it) on a HDD (NTFS) in an old Dell Optiplex system say there was a bad cluster and was able to move a file to a...

Clone QNX/POSIX HDD via Acronis or Norton Ghost? Anyone know if booting from a bootable disc of Acronis or Norton Ghost, will permit me to: 1. Clone an existing Clone QNX/POSIX HDD (250GB) to a new 500GB HDD? (my hunch is that both will permit this) 2. The tougher part may be in how to...

Hello! Is it me or do some old DVD-ROM drives have serious problems reading burned discs (CD-R, CD-RWs, DVD-Rs, DVD+Rs, DVD+RWs, DVD-RWs )? It can be unable to read the whole disc (e.g., Explorer says to insert disc) or partially discs (e.g., can't copy specific files). I have seen this at work...

I've got a 500 GB partition on my XP system. The drive is about 460 GB full. The partition is used to store jpegs which are typically 150KB to 250KB. The file sizes are tiny compared to the space left. So although there is under 10% free space, will it cause noticeable performance problems...

Hello, I have one problem with Intel NAS. I have lot of small sized files (single page TIF images) on my storage system. Now, some file system corruption has occured and now I can't access to some folders, or even I can access them but can't delete it (they are empty if browsed...

Here is an interesting post describing a BIOS bug. It causes 1TB drives to be incorrectly downsized after the BIOS grabs some 2000 sectors at the top end and hides them in a HPA for the purpose of "auto recovering a damaged BIOS to its original...

Hi. In the past, I remember using the disk editor from norton utilities, to explore the disk, and I would be able to browse the FAT32 filetables and the directory structure, to figure out which particular file was located on a particular sector on disk where a section of text or sequence of bytes...