PowerQuest
PowerQuest makes three interesting and useful programs for people concerned with maintaining hard drives and data and rescuing everything from hard drives that are on the verge of failing: PartitionMagic, Drive Image, and DriveCopy. Barlow, however, came to talk about hard drives and not to demonstrate his products. Gene has been our guest several times in the past and has demonstrated prior versions of PartitionMagic with great effect. He seemed to think that, by now, the products can stand on their own.

On this occasion, he gave us a great deal of valuable information on the care and feeding of hard drives and their potential problems. He mentioned that he first came to the SPCUG as a member of IBM's user group, but that now he is pleased to have represented PowerQuest of Orem, Utah, for the past five years. He travels with his wife, who also has copies of the software for sale at a greatly reduced price for users' groups.

He provided a handout that summarized the content of his talk. He said also that the slides he would present and the text of his talk are on his Web site at User Group Relations (which sponsors products from PowerQuest). He is also working on a training video on CD that will be out this summer.

Gene took up four topics: 1) upgrading the hard drive: when we should consider it, how to do it, what tools we may need; 2) organizing the drive: how to set it up, adjust it, monitor it, get it to work as we want it to; 3) using multiple operating systems: "an area that...is one of the most interesting aspects of your computer and will give you some great compatibility that you may not be aware you had," he says; and 4) protecting our hard drives.

Upgrading Your Hard Drive
When you consider upgrading your hard drive, the big questions are 1) when and 2) how big should it be. If it is under 8 gigabytes (GB), it is probably too small, or if it is around 80 percent full, it is time to upgrade. Gene said that, these days, it is difficult to find drives that are under 30GB and capacities of 40, 60, and 80GB are common.

To move all your stuff to the new drive, PowerQuest has DriveCopy 4.0 (lists for $49.95), which is simple and easy to use. It supports Win9x, Millennium, and Windows 2000 (but not XP; they don't yet know all they need to about XP even though they have the beta copies as does everyone else), and drives up to 80GB.

If your drive is beginning to fail, and you are getting a lot of errors, DriveCopy will attempt to copy everything anyway. He explained that you install the new drive as a slave to the old one, then run DriveCopy to copy everything from the old to the new. Then you remove the old drive and set the new one as the active, bootable drive.

Gene recommends that computers have two hard drives that should be approximately the same size. They provide many more options, which he discusses later, for organizing how you use your computer, how to get better performance, and how to back up one to the other.

He suggests having different partitions for different applications and data. If one goes bad, the other will bail you out. Gene also pointed out that hard drives are quite inexpensive now: an advertisement showed a 40GB Maxtor for $99, and he had seen ads for as little as $59 for 20 and 30GB drives. You should look to get the fastest available; many now transfer data at an ATA speed of 100 megahertz for an EIDE drive (UltraDMA-100), as opposed to the 33MHz of less than a year ago. The faster speed helps if your motherboard is faster than 33MHz; otherwise, you gain very little from the faster drive.

There is one process in which you might gain some advantage from a hard drive with high rotational speeds, even if your computer's motherboard is still at 33MHz: if you are doing a lot of video processing or editing, playing video games, and such. Retrieving large files and passing data to and from various parts of the drive will be faster with drives running at the current 7200 rpm. As to choosing between an ATA, a fast ATA, or high rpm, Gene said he would choose the high rpm every time.

As to which is the best drive to buy, Gene showed a list from Drive Service that rates the best and the worst drives according to this site's experience servicing damaged hard drives. IBM's was first on the list, Fujitsu's second, some from Seagate and some from Maxtor among the top ten.

Organizing Your Hard Drive
Gene presented nine steps to a better organized drive. And this is the moment for PartitionMagic. Firstly, the file system: you need to move from the old File Allocation Table (FAT) system to FAT32, which is very clean, uses space more efficiently, and runs very well on large disks - it is the latest technology. You can have partitions of over 2GB, the limit of the old system. PM will convert from FAT to FAT32 if, of course, your operating system supports FAT32.

Secondly, one of the major points here is not to waste disk space, but it is possible to waste it under FAT32. Partitions of under 8GB have cluster sizes, or allocation units, of 4K, and files stored there require a minimum of 4K space (4096 bytes); even files only 100 bytes long take up the minimum 4K. This size is the most efficient of the other possibilities. Partitions larger than 8GB allocate units of 32K, and any file smaller than that will still take up the whole cluster. You end up wasting, on average, 40 percent of the drive's available space.

Gene's example showed a 40GB drive only able to store about 26GB of information. Gene doesn't mean that all partitions must be 8GB. Some might be as small as two or 3GB, all that you need for some specific purpose; other purposes might require partitions as large as 40 or 50GB, but 8GB is the most efficient size.

Thirdly, keeping partitions 8GB or under means, of course, that there will be many on the drive. Partitions, of course, are sections that a drive is divided into; they function like separate hard drives, each with its own drive letter designation (e.g., C:\, D:\, E:\, F:\). These are called logical drives, but they are all on the same physical drive. If you have a second hard disk drive in the computer, the drive letters continue (e.g., G:\, H:\, I:\).

The hard drive can be divided into as many or as few partitions as necessary or desired. Some people like to have just one humongous partition, but if we take Gene seriously, that is a massive waste of space.

There are two types of partitions: primary (bootable, the C:\) and logical. When you install a second drive, it usually takes the D:\ designation, since it also has a primary partition. That can be changed so that the drive letters continue in sequence on physical drive 1, as in the examples above.

It is possible, however, to have up to three or four primary partitions on any physical drive, even though they have to share the same drive letter (C:\) and only one can be active (visible) at a time. Which of the active partitions is used depends on which one is chosen as you boot up by a system called "dual boot," which employs a utility that allows you to choose within the first few seconds. PowerQuest includes BootMagic within PartitionMagic to make the job easy.

According to Gene, primary partitions should be only large enough to contain the operating system (OS) and those files that are part of it. They should only be on physical drive 1, and only at the beginning of the drive, since most OS's have to be within the first 8GB of the drive. He says don't put any primaries on physical drive 2. Logical partitions are more flexible: they can be numerous, they are almost never hidden, and they are are ready to be used as desired.

Therefore, logical drives are for everything else. Gene recommends putting applications (MSOffice, Quicken, WordPerfect Office, PhotoShop, Netscape) in a partition of their own, preferably on physical drive 2 (E:\ in his example). If you have to move them from one drive (logical or physical) to another, you will need some utility that does it for you, since simply moving them within Windows Explorer leaves behind all the pointers that Windows needs to launch any of the programs. CleanSweep, McAfee's Uninstaller, OnTrack's EasyUninstaller, and others all have application movers built in. There is also one at PCMag called COA 2.0 (Change of Address) that you can download free.

Next, Gene says, put all your data files on yet another logical drive. Data are very important, the stuff that no person in his right mind wants to lose. In a single place, they are easy to back up, and they are protected from viruses, because viruses are attached to executable code. Data are safer in their own little niche.

Further, he suggests keeping applications at the beginning of the hard drive (in this case physical drive 2) and the data partition next to it. This way, the read/write head has a shorter distance to travel in the process of accessing the applications and their data, thus increasing the speed of the whole system over what would be the case if things were in partitions more toward the end of the drive.

And by keeping partitions small, the read/write heads have less ground to cover searching out applications and data. In his example, Gene pointed out that he has about 2GB of applications in their partition. If the partition is 8GB, then the read/write head has to pass over those empty 6GB to get to the data partition next door, slowing down working time. Slimming the partition to, say, 2.5GB reduces the distance the arm has to travel and, incidentally, the wear and tear on the drive.

After all these jobs are done, there are partitions for backing things up and maybe even some spare space for future use. In his example, Gene had divided his two hard drives each into three partitions:

C:\Windows	C:\Linux (hidden)	D:\BkUp1 (logical)
E:\Apps (logical)	F:\Data (logical)	G:\BkUp2 (logical)

BkUp1 holds images of E: and F: partitions while BkUp2 holds the images for the two C: partitons. The backup partitions can be as big as you want but don't necessarily take up the whole of the two drives. What remains can be set up in additional partitions for whatever purposes and used to expand old ones as necessary.

Lastly, in this part of the discussion, Gene mentioned defraggers and optimizers, and noted that some programs do both at the same time. These are useful and necessary tools, since as applications and data are used, bits and pieces of files get scattered, or fragmented, around the hard drive. The defragger reassembles all the pieces of files, but not the files all in sequence. The optimizer puts the files in a sequence according to the frequency of their recent use. Restoring a backed up, defragged and optimized partition with most utilities, according to Gene, simply scatters these files across the partition in no particular sequence. Drive Image, on the other hand, which also contains DataKeeper, backs up the partition in its pristine condition and restores it intact, also in its pristine condition.

In responding to a few questions, Gene says:

• To repartition a hard drive, PartitionMagic requires about 20% of the current drive to carry out its business. If the partition is too full, the solution is to remove as much as possible to free up the necessary space.
• He was sorry to report that PM 6.0 does not have the applications mover that was contained in version 5.0, but he hopes that PowerQuest is working to reintroduce it. In the meantime, one or another of the utilities mentioned earlier can do the job.
• If physical drive 1 fails, it is possible to duplicate physical drive 1 on physical drive 2 with a hidden primary partition, so that drive D:\ doesn't show up as the first partition on Drive 2, which is the main concern.
• DriveCopy will not copy from a partition in one machine under one OS to a partition in another machine under a different OS; that copying, from one partition to another, has to be within the same machine since there would be too many differences (device drivers, applications, as well as the different OS; there is no way to connect the applications to the registry of the other machine; and there is a utility called PCRelocate that can be found at Aloha Bob, a company in Florida.

Using Multiple Operating Systems
In this part of the discussion, Gene talked about upgrading Windows as well as using multiple OS's. If you want to upgrade your OS to Windows Millennium, say, Microsoft says to simply add Millennium over the top of you current system and, as Gene says, "hope everything goes right." But, he also says, that causes real problems for many people. Here are Gene's recommendations to do it safely. Assuming that your current Windows 98 is working well and is relatively stable, you will want to leave it that way until the new setup is working well. He suggests setting up an empty, primary partition next to the current one where you would install WinMe in two steps.

Using PartitionMagic, copy your entire current Win98 into the new empty partition. You now have two identical partitions of Win98. Then, install Windows Millennium on top of the copy. If that installation does not go well and crashes or is unstable, you still have your original, somewhat stable, and somewhat reliable primary partition with Win98 untouched. You can then use PartitionMagic to wipe out the whole mess and start over. If, after a second or third try, everything is running well, then you can use PartitionMagic to delete the original partition and run Windows Millennium as your primary system. You can, in this way, Gene says, migrate to new releases without burning all your bridges. All of your register settings, shortcuts, and other pointers are intact. WinME should be able to find everything. But it is possible to maintain both OS's, and each should be able to run all your applications since each has the same references to the applications that are stored in their own partition.

If your applications had been in C:\ with the original Windows 98, they would be hidden while you tried to run the Millennium version. It may take a while to make sure that all applications are running smoothly under WinME, since a lot of new drivers were added and some old ones were deleted - which means that you may have to get upgrades for some of your current programs.

But there is yet another, and probably better, method to running things smoothly. You can retain your original primary Win95/98 partition since, you may think, it works well enough, and there are things there that you may want to use... maybe... someday. Gene says that the reason Win98 is as unstable as often as it is, is that we have so much stuff - "garbage" sitting around - that is difficult to get rid of. Even though uninstallation utilities are available, they are not always reliable. They don't always remove things completely, and can often remove files that are necessary for other programs to run. The solution is to install the new Millennium in its own hidden primary partition, in its pure form, so that you don't end up with all the garbage residing on the original partition. Then choose which one suits your purposes at any given time.

And Gene has a sort of ingenious way to do so. You set up the empty, hidden primary partition as before. You can use the upgrade version of WinME, which is really a full version but needs to verify the presence of an older version of Windows to continue installation ($49.95 or so as opposed to the full version for about $150.00). Gene says to begin installing ME in the empty partition from the CD, but since there is not a prior release in that partition, what then? As the installation begins and runs for a minute or two, it will pause and put a message on the screen asking where the prior release is. You then take the ME CD out of the drive, dig out your CD of Win95/98 and put that in the drive and give it the address of the CD reader. ME will then check to see that it is a valid installation CD and read what it needs into memory, which then allows you to remove the 95/98 CD and replace the ME CD, which will then proceed with the installation. This will be the cleanest upgrade you can get. Now, however, your newly installed Windows Millennium has no applications to run since none of the registry's setting and shortcuts and pointers were carried over from the original partition - a good thing as none of the old clutter is there either. The trick here is to set up a new partition for the major, important apps, leaving out all those things that you use only occasionally. To use all that old stuff, you reboot the computer, choosing 95/98 and run it all there - with BootMagic, of course.

Protecting Your Hard Drive
Hard drives are mechanical devices, and like all mechanical devices, they wear out at some time. They spin all the time, and the read/write head rushes back and forth. Hard drives are estimated to last in the range of two to three years. Used occasionally and taken good care of, they may last four or five. They have been known to crash in as short a time as six months.

Gene recommends planning a routine to protect yourself against this kind of fatality. When a drive crashes, you lose everything on the computer, and you must start from scratch to rebuild. Backing up won't prevent the drive from wearing out and crashing, but it will protect you from having to go through the painful process of rebuilding a whole computer.

Backing up on floppy disks-well, there not that many floppies in the world. Tapes are extremely slow and cumbersome and the data can only be accessed by running through the whole tape to find what you want. Enough Zip disks to do the job would break the bank.

Additional hard drives are by far the most practical solution: they are inexpensive, even cheap in some cases (see above).

A couple of methods suggest themselves. One is to make an exact duplicate of your main drive, store it in a safe place until it is needed, and then simply replace the broken one and continue working.

Another is to have two drives installed and to back up certain partitions on the different drives to partitions on the other (see above) and to maintain the backups routinely, about once a month or less. The one contingency this method does not take into account is the failing of both drives at the same time. In normal circumstances, both would not go down simultaneously; but one should consider the possibility of the occasional fire, theft, falling tree, earthquake, tidal wave, and such other disasters as might occur.

To plan for these, the CD-R disk (a removable, storable medium) can come to the rescue. The duplicate hard drive, having been stored in a safe place, will do as well. Data files, though, change too often for these methods to be completely effective. Those files need to be backed up weekly and even daily. PowerQuest's utility, DataKeeper, formerly sold separately, is now included in Drive Image. It can be set up to watch over the data partition to back up any data file that has changed since the last time it was backed up. Then about once a month, this partition can be backed up to a CD-R or some other removable medium.

At this point, Gene responded to more questions:

• PartitionMagic's manual contains a couple hundred pages of information on hard drives, and some of the more technical aspects are in PDF format on the CD, including a paper on using multiple OS's.
• With DriveCopy, you can copy large partitions to smaller partitions if the smaller is still big enough to contain the files, so long as the move doesn't destroy any data. DriveCopy cannot copy data from within the partition and move it to another partition; it moves whole partitions only. Other utilities are necessary to move sections.
• In moving the primary partition, C:\, Gene moves all the things that come with the OS. For instance, some applications, like BootMagic, force themselves on to drive C:\ in order to work. Even if applications are installed on drive E:\, bits and pieces are automatically put on C:\; we can't get away from that.
• Drive Image 4.0 added support for Windows Millennium and allows copying directly to a CD, whereas in 3.0 we had to put a copy on the hard drive and then copy to a CD. We can also store stuff on hidden partitions that we cannot get to with normal OS's. the Image Size Estimator tells how many blank CDs are needed before starting to burn; Image Integrity, one of the best features, tests everything after burning to make sure it all works. Then, the File Editor has been improved, and Data Keeper is included.
• Gene is unsure whether the enterprise version of PartitionMagic Pro contains BootMagic, and suggests calling PowerQuest to see if a patch is available.
• PowerQuest has a whole line of enterprise products similar to the ones discussed here. Drive Image Pro supports RAID configurations, as does PartitionMagic.
• In keeping the primary partition as small as possible, programs that require temporary files need to be redirected to other partitions. That can generally be done through the options or properties functions; otherwise the C:\ partition needs to be increased.
• To protect partitions from unwanted guests, you can use PartitionMagic to set up the boot partition and then use passwords with PartitionMagic to prevent them from using it to change things.
• PartitionMagic does not support Windows 2000 dynamic volumes. It probably will in a future version, especially in enterprise versions.

GearGrip
Actually, the evening's first presentation was from Ken Hopkins, who demonstrated the GearGrip CRT from CaseAce.

Ken previously demonstrated the GearGrip Pro, which is a set of straps designed to carry an entire tower computer. It has a shoulder strap and handle, plus a pouch for the keyboard and places to put your mouse and all your cords. This time Ken had the GearGrip CRT, which allows carrying a monitor up to 21 inches.

Ken noted that game-players are particularly interested in these tools, because they often attend LAN parties where they connect their computers into LANs and play games against other attendees. Ken lent his to his daughter when she changed apartments and had some difficulty retrieving them, he said.

The GearGrips are sold on the GearGrip Web site. The GearGrip Pro sells for $34.95, and the GearGrip CRT is $26.95.