Disk software

Hard disks are mechanical devices, and, like all mechanical devices, they can fail without notice. Some hard disk failures are entirely avoidable, but many others are governed only by luck and chance. Because there are only 3 nanometers of clearance between the head and the disk platter, which holds the actual data, even the slightest misalignment can, and usually does, result in a catastrophic head crash.

Every traditional hard disk comes with an air filter that equalizes the atmospheric pressure and moisture between the enclosure and the outside environment.

Often, a head crash is caused by a sudden jolt, such as when a user throws his or her laptop on a bed instead of carefully laying it down. All reputable hard disk manufacturers thoroughly test their products before selling them to consumers. But even with modern testing methods, defective hard disks still sometimes slip out and end up on sites like Amazon. Most hard drives are designed to operate at temperatures from 5 to 50 degrees Celsius, and some newer hard drives can operate at up to 60 degrees Celsius.

In extreme cases, heat can even cause the electronic circuit board that controls the entire hard drive to fail, making it impossible to do hard drive repair regardless of which software you choose for the job.

Inside every hard drive is a plethora of sensitive electronic components. A sudden power failure preceded by a short power surge can literary fry these components, rendering the entire hard drive useless. A high-quality surge protector is by far the best way how you can protect yourself against electronic hard drive failure. When unintended changes are introduced to data during the data writing process, we talk about file corruption.

Of course, you can do a lot more to prevent hard drive data loss, but these five best practices are enough to provide a solid foundation that you can then build on as you see fit. Does it seem that your hard drive is dying? There are many wonderful hard disk repair software tools that you can use to diagnose and fix hard drive issues.

This article lists 20 of the best free tools for partitioning, cloning, diagnostics, repair, recovery, encryption, wiping or drive information and is intended to supplement the list provided on Free SysAdmin Tools.

PhotoRec recovers photos, videos and documents from different storage media by going beyond the file system and looking for specific data blocks i. When you first run TestDisk you are asked to choose whether you want a log file to be created. You are then given a list of partition table types to choose from this will allow the application to use the correct signature when reading the partitions on all available disks , before being presented with a list of available hard drive partitions to perform a selected action on.

The choice of actions you can perform on each partition include:. When you launch EaseUS Partition Master Free, use the operations listed on the left hand pane or the top menu to perform an action against the selected partition s. WinDirStat is a disk usage and clean-up utility that allows you to visualize how data is distributed across a disk and what types of data or which locations are hogging up most space.

Clicking on a box within the graphic will display the file in question within the tree view on the left hand pane of the window.

CloneZilla Live is a bootable Linux distribution that allows you to clone individual machines and CloneZilla SE is a package that you install and configure on a Linux distribution that allows you to push images to multiple clients simultaneously over the network. Using this utility you can mount image files as drive letters and then browse the data directly. A neat additional feature of OSFMount is its ability to create RAM disks, useful if you want additional security since everything within RAM will be flushed when the machine is shutdown or need to store data that requires fast access times such as browser cache, database files, etc.

It has an intuitive interface that helps you to quickly visualize how much of the drive is fragmented and which files are causing most fragmentation. Hover your mouse over a particular square on the map and click on it to display the files associated with that particular colour e.

SSDLife displays information about your SSD drive, its health status and estimated lifetime — all useful for helping you to plan ahead and take action accordingly. SSDLife automatically detects the model of your SSD drive and displays information about it instantly upon loading the application.

DBAN is a bootable application that forensically wipes hard drives to prevent identity theft. Interactive mode allows you to select which drives to wipe and which options to use when wiping them. Automatic mode will automatically wipe all discovered drives — no questions asked! Once you start the application, select the drive from the drop down list and navigate to the appropriate tab to view the information you need or start a scan accordingly.

It can also create an encrypted volume that appears as a normal file but is only accessible when mounted via VeraCrypt using the provided password. VeraCrypt is built upon the now defunct TrueCrypt but fixes many of the vulnerabilities and security concerns that plagued TrueCrypt.

With DiskGenius you can quickly repartition a hard drive or flash drive into multiple partitions with desired partition table even if the disk contains partitions already. Due to disk repartition process removes everything on the disk and causes data and partition loss, you need to create a backup for important data before executing this function.

Launch DiskGenius and select the disk you want to repartition and click " Quick Partition " button from toolbar and the Quick Partition window opens up. Till this procedure you can make your own decisions, for example, partition table style, partition count, partition size, volume label, file system type, 4K sector alignment, etc. Just set these settings bases on your actual needs. If you are not specialized in such configurations, you can follow default settings. Click OK button from the lower right corner and DiskGenius starts to partition the selected disk.

Note: It is not allowed to partition the hard drive where operating system is located when Windows is running. Therefore, if you want to repartition hard drive and reinstall Windows, you need to boot to WinPE to complete the task. To make best of disk space you may want to resize partition , extend partition, shrink partition or split partition in Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, etc.

Though Windows has a built-in functionality in Disk Management to expand or shrink partition, it is not powerful enough to deal with various such as low disk space issue.

It happens your hard drive might not be properly partitioned, and you may encounter "Low Disk Space" issue which says "You are running very low on disk space on Local Disk C:. Click here to see if you can free space on this device" or "You are running out of disk space on system C:.

To free space on this drive by deleting old or unnecessary files, click here…" Facing such issue, you can try deleting some unnecessary files or move files to another drivea. Alternatively, you can extend the partition to remove the low disk space issue. DiskGenius is capable of changing partition size without data loss, and it provides a couple of options to meet different requirement: resize partition, extend partition, split partition, etc.

Now we'll use third-party disk partition software to resize partition. Step 1. Right-click on the partition you want to change its size and select " Resize Partition ".

All-in-one solution for IT professionals, use it and you will love it! Free Download. Partition Manager Partition Manager Quickly resize, extend and split partitions without data loss to make the best use of hard drive capacity. We all love DiskGenius! The disk was with GUID partition table. I have used the free version to resize exfat partition, and process is fast and does not cause data loss.