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By Root 1620 0

to do in this case is to fire up the System Setup program and see if autodetect sees the drive. If it does, you do not have a physical problem with the drive. If autodetect fails, shut off the system and remove the ribbon cable, but leave the power cable attached. Restart the system and listen to the drive. If the drive spins up, you know it is getting good power. This is usually a clue that the drive is probably good. In that case, you need to look for more mundane problems such as an unplugged data cord or jumpers incorrectly set. If the drive doesn’t spin up, try another power connector. If it still doesn’t spin up and you’ve triple-checked the jumpers and ribbon cable, you have a problem with the onboard electronics, and the drive is dead.

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NOTE If you ever lose a hard drive that contains absolutely critical information, you can turn to a company that specializes in hard drive data recovery. The job will be expensive—prices usually start around $1000 (U.S.)—but when you have to have the data, such companies are your only hope. Do a Web search for “data recovery” or check the Yellow Pages for companies in this line of business.

Beyond A+

Modern hard drives have many other features that are worth knowing about, but that rarely impact beginning techs. A couple of the more interesting ones are spindle speed and third-party hard drive tools. If you have a burning desire to dive into hard drives in all their glory, you need not go any farther than the Storage Review, an excellent site dedicated solely to hard drives. Here’s the link: www.storagereview.com.

Third-Party Partition Tools

Disk Management is a good tool, but it’s limited for some situations. Some really great third-party tools on the market can give you incredible flexibility and power to structure and restructure your hard drive storage to meet your changing needs. They each have interesting unique features, but in general they enable you to create, change, and delete partitions on a hard drive without destroying any of the programs or data stored there. Slick! These programs aren’t on the CompTIA A+ exams, but all PC techs use at least one of them, so let’s explore three of the most well-known examples: Symantec’s Norton PartitionMagic, Avanquest Partition Commander Professional, and the open source Linux tool, GParted.

Probably the most well-known third-party partition tool is PartitionMagic, although it’s quite dated at this point. It supports older versions of Windows, but has problems with Windows Vista/7. With it, you can create, resize, split, merge, delete, undelete, and convert partitions without destroying your data. Among the additional features it advertises are the capability to browse, copy, or move files and folders between supported partitions; to expand an NTFS partition—even if it’s a system partition—without rebooting; to change NTFS cluster sizes; and to add new partitions for multiple OSs by using a simple wizard.

Avanquest offers a variety of related products, one of which is the very useful Partition Commander Professional. Unlike PartitionMagic, it supports all versions of Windows and enables you to play with your partitions without destroying your data. Among its niftier features are the capability to convert a dynamic disk to a basic disk nondestructively (which you can’t do with the Microsoft-supplied Windows tools); to defrag the master file table on an NTFS partition; and to move unused space from one partition to another on the same physical drive, automatically resizing the partitions based on the amount of space you tell it to move. Figure 12-71 shows the Partition Commander dialog box for moving unused space between partitions.

Figure 12-71 Partition Commander

The only problem with PartitionMagic and Partition Commander is that they cost money. There’s nothing wrong with spending money on a good product, but if you can find something that does the job for free, why not try it? If you think like I do, check out the Gnome Partition Editor, better known as GParted. You can find it at http://source-forge.net/.