This edition of Hard Disk Manager 8.5 is mainly a disk-partitioning utility, and in that respect it does the job very well indeed. The wizards make it hugely accessible, although it still isn’t perfect, and we like the push towards more OS and file system independence. The backup options are a useful extra for keeping things in order, although we’d still recommend using a proper file backup program such as Ghost or True Image along with it. But when you consider the power and range of features on offer here, it’s a decent investment for users on a budget.

Cons Help system geared more toward experienced users than novices; backup process slower than with some other apps; Rescue CD performs inconsistently

The boot management tool, once in place, refused to spot the main Vista partition on our hard drive, and thus wouldn't boot. If we booted straight to CD and loaded up the Hard Disk Manager from there, we could find a way in, but this slowed down the workings of the computer enormously.

Can Intelligence Agencies Read Overwritten Data? A response to Gutmann.

Ubuntu Rescue Remix is a GNU/Linux live system which runs from CD or USB flash device. It provides the data recovery specialist with a command-line interface environment equipped with the best free-libre, open source data recovery and forensics tools available.

Summary This specification defines a methodology for enhancing Ubuntu's boot procedures to configure and support booting a system dependent on a degraded RAID1 device. Rationale Ubuntu's installer currently supports installation to software RAID1 targets for /boot and /. When one of the mirrored disks fails, and mdadm marks the RAID degraded, it becomes impossible to reboot the system in an unattended manner. Booting Ubuntu with a failed device in a RAID1 will force the system into a recovery console. In some cases, this is the desired behavior, as a local system administrator would want to backup critical data, cleanly halt the system, and replace the faulty hardware immediately. In other cases, this behavior is highly undesired--particularly when the system administrator is remotely located and would prefer a system with redundant disks tolerate a failed device even on reboot.

Things go wrong. Hard disks fail and whole servers crash. Luckily, many Linux-based distributions are available to help systems administrators handle minor catastrophes. We looked at four of the most portable, all of which fit on a 210MB mini CD -- SliTaz, Parted Magic, GParted, and RIPLinuX.

If you have a disk drive with errors on it, that you'd like to be able to read the recoverable data from, GNU ddrescue is your best friend. It is modeled after the two preceding programs, dd_rescue (with an underbar), and dd_rhelp. But GNU ddrescue it's f

This is comprehensive documentation for one of the most useful linux/UNIX Windows commands-dd. It is a bitstream duplicator for duplicateing data. If you have a question, post it.

When dd_rescue finds a bad block, dd_rhelp has it jump ahead a bit, and then read blocks in reverse until it finds the tail end of the bad block group. It then continues forward and grabs all of the good blocks first. Then, after it finishes grabbing your