Case:Western Digital 1T hard disk, used under the Windows operating system, inserted into the computer, did not detect the hard disk, there was no response after power -on, and after the engineer’s test, the magnetic head was damaged, and the hardware was required to be replaced. Solution:The engineer evaluates the degree of damage to the…
Every IT professional can tell a horror story about an upgrade, roll-out, or migration gone awry. So many factors are involved; hardware, software, compatibility, timing, data, procedures, security protocols, and of course the well-meaning but imperfect human.
Over 2008, IT departments and staff can look forward to a number of upgrade projects for their computer system infrastructure. According to Gartner, Inc., the number of PC shipments during fourth quarter 2007 increased 13.1% over the same period in 2006. Global PC shipments during 2007 increased 13.4% over 2006 – equating to 271.2 million units in 2007.
While a slower economy than in previous years may lower the number of units, the fact that organizations have been investing in new units shows that Hardware Life-cycle Managementis still a mainstay of corporate IT’s responsibilities and will continue to be such.
IT professionals realize that scheduled change is a pattern for the industry. Whether this change involves accommodating new users, replacing old servers, or upgrading staff to newer systems, there is always change within the computer organization. Sometimes it is easy to only rely on hardware or software budgets for your roadmap. However, these budgets may be short-sighted and lack proper planning. Using accounting budgets alone to manage hardware may not take into consideration the overall life span of the equipment.
Equipment/software life-cycles and your road map
Managing IT equipment and product life-cycles is an important function of IT department staff. As a goal, equipment life-cycle management should reduce failures and data-loss because computer equipment is replaced before it fails, and it should reduce the total cost of equipment management over its lifetime. Depending on the organization, equipment life-cycles are based on different criteria.
• Warranty expiration: If your IT infrastructure has a mix of equipment in place, with different makes and types of equipment, then your warranty-based product life-cycle management will be complicated. Using this approach is not only short-sighted, it also mirrors the first time you bought the equipment. Consider the expanding department who needs to plead with the CFO or budgetary manager for a non-planned equipment purchase. Three years later when the warranty expires, the department will be back again on their knees begging for replacements or an extension to the expiring warranties. Whichever the case, it will be an unplanned expense.
• Waiting until equipment fails: In our economy, budgets are tight and management rightfully wants to get the most production or usage out of a piece of equipment before having to replace it. This approach is very risky and will usually cost more in the end. IT equipment rarely fails at a “convenient” time. If you’re lucky, the failure occurs during a slower period and your IT department is equipped to get you back up and running quickly. In reality, this is not usually the case. Consider the real cost of equipment failure if it is month-end or year-end and the server with the financial data crashes; or a company has just secured a large contract and at the eleventh hour, one or more workstations fails or becomes intermittent causing wasted downtime on the project and inefficient use of personnel resources.
• Capital expense budgets: Some IT departments base their product life-cycles on departmental accounting policies for capital expense purchases. Of course, this alternative method can have a knock-on effect when there is a business need for expansion and this wasn’t considered in the fiscal budget. Additionally, in larger user environments, departments may have control of their own capital expense budgets, so there may be many departments with different budget needs. When the life-cycle of one department’s equipment is complete, the number of fragmented purchases may actually reduce your company’s buying power. In contrast, a more structured approach would concentrate equipment purchases to various times throughout the year. This method is preferred by CFO or budget managers who will use a predefined purchase allocation per business unit or department to facilitate budget planning for the next year.
The first sector of NTFS partitions is used as the partition boot sector. It contains the information which allows the OS to read the partition. Without it, the partition cannot be accessed.
NTFS has a backup copy of the boot sector on the last sector of the partition which can allow recovery programs to restore it. The FAT also has the boot sector, and resides on the first sector of this partition. The difference is that FAT does not have a backup copy of this information; Recovery is much more difficult than NTFS.
The first file stored on an NTFS partition is called the Master File Table (MFT) which is essentially a listing of the names, properties and locations of all the other files in this partition. This is referenced by the operating system to access individual files.
NTFS stores a backup copy of this file. Data restoration software can access or restore a copy of the MFT in order to access files on the partition.
FAT partitions with something similar, called predictably enough the File Allocation Table (FAT). The FAT is also backed up on the disk, and can be restored by software. The major disadvantage of the FAT as compared to the MFT is that it needs to be located on a specific area of the partition to function, so if that area of the disk is damaged, recovery will become more difficult.
When a file is deleted (removed from the recycle bin within Windows), both file systems simply mark the file as deleted. The data is not actually removed from the hard drive, but rather the space it takes up on the disk is now considered to be free. Consequently, if you delete a file accidentally, you have an excellent chance of being able to restore it provided you do not write more information to the disk.
For example, If you two NTFS partitions on the effected disk. When you ran FDISK, it wrote garbage information over certain areas of this disk, including areas of both partitions. As a result, the first partition (the one with your article on it) had lost its partition boot sector, meaning it could not be accessed normally by an operating system. The second partition had merely had crucial system files overwritten, and was unbootable, but still can accessible once you transferred the disk to another computer.
There is a way to fix all of this, and get the data back
One rule to remember when you have lost data, please don’t write anything more to the affected hard drive!
If you have deleted a partition by accident, do not create another partition, just leave it blank.
If you have deleted files from the recycling bin that you realize you need, do notsave anything to the drive. The reason is that hard drives do not actually erase anything, not data or partitions. When you erase a file from the operating system, it is just marked on the drive as having been deleted. When the system needs to store more data on the drive, it will consider files on the drive marked ‘deleted’ as being empty space, and cheerfully copy over them. If that happens then you’re in big trouble.
Another rule applies twice over for partitions; since partition information just presents the operating system with a way of addressing the space available on the drive. If you wipe out a partition everything from it will seem to be gone.
If there is no partition information, no data can be read by the operating system. This does not mean that your data it is not there however, only that means you can’t see it. Data-recovery programs have no such handicap.
What you need to do was to allow FDISK to test the integrity of the drive, which it does by writing a pattern of data to certain areas. Of course, in the case, many of these areas contained partition information and critical system files. The result was one missing partition, due to a destroyed boot sector, and one unbootable (but still readable) XP installation.
How.
First and best thing to do in a data-loss situation is to make sure no more data is written to the drive. Obviously, if you have just the one partition and it’s fried, you can’t boot normally to the operating system. The best option in this situation is to transfer the drive to another computer, preferably one using the same file-system as your damaged partition (such as, the same operating system, or a newer version). See the PCSTATS Beginners Guides sectionfor information on how to move your hard drive to another computer.
Transferring the HDD to another computer has the dual benefit of preventing the drive from being written to accidentally, and potentially allowing you to retrieve information from the disk just by using Windows Explorer to look through file structures.
If you have damaged or erased essential operating system files, but the partition information is still intact Windows will not boot. The HDD can still be read from a different operating system which is one way out of the doom and gloom.
All the processes described from here on are strictly for resolving software issues with your data, like accidentally deleting partitions or files. If your hard drive has a physical problem, if it is making strange noises, shaking, rattling or smoking, nothing here will apply. Turn off your computer, unplug the drive and call a data recovery service if your data are vital.
A typical HDD has two electric motors; a spindle motor that spins the disks and an actuator (motor) that positions the read/write head assembly across the spinning disks. The disk motor has an external rotor attached to the disks; the stator windings are fixed in place. Opposite the actuator at the end of the head…
HDD Printed circuit board (PCB) with board number BF41-00286A is usually used on these Samsung hard disk drives: HD103SI, HD103SI/A, FW 1AG01120, Samsung 1TB SATA 3.5 Hard Drive The BF41-00286A Samsung PCB repair process can usually be divided into 2 steps: find a replacement PCB and firmware transfer. BF41-00286A Samsung PCB: Board Number Finding a…
Computer viruses are proving to be highly complex but preventing viruses from infecting your computer systems is simple. Use two well-known brands of anti-virus software and keep them as current as possible.
Beyond that, there are some simple, common sense procedures that everyone should use, whether at work or in the home computing environment. Never open a file whose origins are unknown. In a simpler day, that wisdom only applied to executable files, or files that did something. They have the suffixes .exe, .com and .bat and each can start a program on your computer. These viruses spread through games downloaded from the Internet, on borrowed diskettes and through the old ‘bulletin board’ services.
Today, unfortunately, a whole new wave of viruses has been unleashed on unsuspecting computer users because software manufacturers introduced feature-rich new programs without considering how vulnerable they are to viruses. Now, almost any document and many email messages can carry and spread ‘macro’ viruses at lightning speed. That’s why it is so important never to open messages or documents from unknown sources. Viruses can delete data, change file names or even damage the physical media the data where the data is stored.
How important is virus protection?
If your data is critical to your business operations, there is nothing more important. Even though about 75 per cent of all data loss incidents are caused by human error or system malfunctions, a virus attack can still cripple your data center. A combination of regular, verified backups and constantly updated virus protection are absolutely essential to protect your data – and your organization.
Case:After the company was launched suddenly, a company could not find the hard disk. The customer service could find the hard disk after re -inserting the RAID card and hard disk. RAID information did not report an error. It was prompted that the system file was not found. Solution:After testing and analysis by the engineer…
Portable storage devices are pretty important in today’s day and age. You can hardly go anywhere without seeing someone or the other with a flashy hot pink one or sporting a USB braided in between funky strings around their neck. Perhaps that’s going a bit too far but you might as well always have one in your wallet or your car dashboard. That is just how essential they have become for us that at any given time, we may feel the need for more storage. But of course, like all things that give us some technological advantage, there are drawbacks.
Easy to Store, Easier to Lose
In the case, of portable drives, the major disadvantage comes with the concerns of privacy and security. In short, these drives are almost a sure fire way to get yourself upped with a keylogger app or some computer monitoring software or the other. And then what happens. Not only do you compromise your security with risks of losing data but also risk all your personal information falling into malicious hands.
So you should be aware of the risks that come with using these cheap and easy tools. Starting with the basics, they are pretty flimsy and can get damaged very easily. This means you need to be extra careful with them so you don’t damage them to the point of no return…which means you losing all your saved data which is usually comprised of your entire backup. But that is the obvious and physical aspect of it which you probably already know. The solution to that is to use the software backup option that most USBs come with. This way if the USB is damaged, you still have the information stored somewhere on cloud. And if not, opt for cloud data storage.
What Organizations Dread
Let us come to the more sinister side, the side that is susceptible to all sorts of dangers including malware, spyware such as computer monitoring software, bugs, Trojans and the never ending list of cyber calamities goes on. People have horror stories about free keyloggers, and even paid ones that were used to infiltrate their privacy. Just like other hard drives, CD ROMS, and floppy disks, USBs and other portable hard drives are just as targetable by virus and similar spyware risks. So for organizations, the fear that their workers can lose and mishandle information they store on portable drives in order to change work environments (for e.g, from work to home or to a remote system), is more real than any other malicious malware threat around.
To secure themselves from a nightmare scenario where things get ported out too fast and without warning, most organizations make sure they have complete virus and spyware protection solutions in place. But that’s the thing with these portable drives; threats can go completely and thoroughly undetected. So again, what is the solution?
What Is Available
Well really no easy solution. At best, for organizations they can attempt to disable USB usage altogether. So instead of restricting USBs on premises (which is really a fallible plan), companies can use special computer monitoring software to block any one storing and transferring data via the portable device. Of course, for this, a lot of investment needs to be done on the part of the IT Department. But as the menace of data and security breach continues, it seems to be worth looking into. However, the question that raises itself is whether the future of technology can find a cheap and reasonable solution to this problem.
Author Bio
Jane Andrew is a writer and guest blogger of mobistealth with years of experience in tech industry. She loves to write about computer monitoring software and keylogger. You can also follow her on Twitter @janeandrew01 to get tip and news about cell phone.
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