Hard drive recovery guide

One day when I turned on my computer and then I observe that my computer is not running properly.

The usual problem was that my machine was not working correctly and has slowed down to a crawling speed. drive

Now taking an age to execute a command. I usually smile to myself while I take a further look on my PC. Why the smile you might ask?

Simply because in nine out ten cases, the PC in question has not had a hard drive recovery. This has resulted in the drive being full, as well as badly fragmented.

These are problems that are easy enough to solve just time consuming, a simple hard drive recovery will help.

Other problems, such as Trojan Horses, or viruses or worms and possibly a combination of all three are somewhat more serious.

While these infections can be cleaned up reasonably easily through a hard drive recovery. In most cases sufficient damage my have already occurred.

Now the need to necessitate more drastic action being called upon to restore the system’s health. The first thing I do is to boot the computer up and check to see an anti-virus application in my PC last update. I connect to the Internet and download the latest signature files from the manufacturer’s site.

Once the updated files are installed, I run a complete system scan so that any monsters present can be found and destroyed. Having ensured that the system is now free form infections, the Recycle bin is emptied and I then copy a small ‘. bat’ file written by Fred Langa to the ‘C’ drive’s root directory.

When run, Clean9x aggressively seeks out and cookies. It does its work by booting to DOS, cleaning up, and then running Scandisk to look for and correct any faults that may exist in any folder or files.

It also corrects reported Free Space Errors and detects and corrects errors in both the Master Boot Records and File Allocation Tables of each installed drive and/or partitions. By now the system is usually beginning to show signs of coming back to life through hard drive recovery, but help is still needed. This is the time to run a defrag session another part of hard drive recovery. All the files left on the disk can be sorted and organized in one contiguous stream, instead of being spread all over the place.

However, before starting the ‘de-fragger’, I always check the disk’s properties to see how much free space remains on it. This is necessary, as the process of de-fragmentation requires at least 20% of the disk have no data written to it, so that the fragmented bits can be moved around before being assembled in one continuous stream.

If there is not enough free space is available then it has to be created by either moving files to another disk, or partition or, by deleting them.

Another way to create free space is to uninstall some large programmes. Microsoft Office is one candidate provided that the installation CD is available. Again another process in the hard drive recovery. On a heavily fragmented disk this process can take considerable amount of time. Last week, for instance, it took five hours to de-frag an 80 gigabytes partition that had never had this process carried out on it. Once done, it is time to re-boot and start with the rest of the cure. First, I install Norton’s excellent utilities suite and run the System Check utility. As its name implies this utility finds and repairs problems that commonly effect computer systems.

It checks for problems with disks, all files and folders and the Windows registry by looking for missing files and folders, broken shortcuts and links, registry entries that point nowhere and then looks for solutions.

These solutions are displayed individually and the user can elect either to choose solution individually or automatically. I usually let Norton repair problems automatically. Having identified part of the hard drive recovery and repaired system problems, the next step of the hard drive recovery is to optimize the Windows swap file.

What is the Swap File and how can it help hard drive recovery?

Here is a brief explanation:

Back in the good old days of command prompts and 1.2MB floppy disks, programs needed very little RAM because the main (almost universal) operating system was DOS and its memory footprint was small.

That was truly fortunate because RAM at that time was horrendously expensive. Although it may seem ludicrous, 4MB was just not enough. Due to its GUI (Graphical User Interface) nature, it consequently had a larger memory footprint than DOS. Thus, more RAM is needed. Unfortunately, RAM prices had not decreased as fast as RAM requirement increased. This meant that windows users had to either fork out a fortune for more RAM or run only simple programs. Neither were attractive options. An alternative method was needed to alleviate this problem. The solution found was to use some space on the hard disk as extra RAM this is a good process for hard drive recovery and faster usage. Although the hard disk is much slower than RAM, it is also much cheaper and users always have a lot more hard disk space than RAM.

So, windows was designed to create this pseudo-RAM or in Microsoft’s terms, Virtual Memory, in order to make up for the shortfall in RAM when running memory-intensive programs. Virtual Memory is also known as the “swap file” or paging file.

This article is written for those with old machines and don’t want to upgrade this may be a solution to an infected ageing machine.

How does it Work for hard drive recovery?

Whenever the operating system has enough memory, the swap file usually isn’t used. But if it runs out of memory, the operating system will page (or swap) out the least recently used information in the memory to the swap file on the hard disk.

This frees up some memory for the most recent application’s use. The operating system will continuously do this as more and more data is loaded into the RAM. Conversely, when any data stored in the swap file is needed, it is swapped with the least recently used data in the memory.

This allows the swap file to behave like RAM although programs cannot run directly off it. You will also note that because the operating system cannot directly run programs off the swap file, some programs may not run even with a large swap file if you have too little RAM.

By default windows uses an open-ended swap file and all this swapping in and out causes it to fragment over time. Even today, although the average home user’s computer comes with at least 128MB in the average user’s computer meant that memory shortage while running any program is much less of a worry than it was back then, the swap file is essential when multi-tasking. Note that over the years, the emphasis has changed to multi-tasking. No longer will people be solely stuck to using one application at a time.

In fact, it’s common to have 5 or more applications running simultaneously! For example, while browsing the Net, I normally have 4 or 5 Internet Explorer windows (loaded as separate processes), a download manager like Flash Get, MSN Messenger, Outlook Express, and Real Jukebox running at the same time with a couple of Word documents also open.

That’s a total of 8-10 applications running simultaneously! Even with 128MB of RAM, it would be impossible to load everything into the RAM. Thus, a swap file is needed to store the least used data in the memory so that I can open up all those applications I need.

And let’s not forget the disk cache. This is why you need to think about implementing some of this when doing a hard drive recovery, if your running older versions of windows with less sepcifications than the newer machines of today. Operating systems like Win9x and Win2k allocate a sizeable portion of the RAM to the disk cache. This speeds up accesses to hard disk data by caching the most frequently used as well as data that are most likely to be accessed next by the computer.

This cuts down on the amount of available RAM. So, without a swap file, you won’t be able to open many applications even if your computer has 64MB or RAM. Finally, some programs require the use of a swap file to function properly so you can follow this advice for hard drive recovery to run programs more efficent.

It may be to store sensitive data on something less volatile than the RAM or to ensure the computer will have sufficient memory to run it.

But whatever the reasons, a swap file is needed in order for these programs to run.

Why Optimize The Swap file for hard drive recovery?

Unless your computer is truly loaded with RAM, it will almost always use the swap file. As such, its performance affects the performance of the whole computer. Now, using a swap file may sound like a really cheap way to run memory intensive programs and perfrom hard drive recovery without the expense of buying more RAM.

However, even the fastest hard disk is more than an order of magnitude slower than the slowest RAM. Numerically, the fastest hard disk is currently 20x slower than the PC100 SDRAM common in many computers. So, swap file is only a stopgap solution for the lack of sufficient RAM. As long as you use the swap file, there will always be performance degradation.

The ideal solution for insufficient RAM is always more RAM, not more Virtual Memory. But since we can’t always afford the amount of RAM we want, a swap file is necessary to allow us to run today’s memory guzzling programs. As you can tell, more isn’t better for the swap file because more swap file space will only give you the ability to run more memory intensive programs at once.

It will not speed up your system. But what we can do is to optimize the swap file so that the performance degradation when using it is minimized.

So How Do We Optimize The Swap file for hard drive recovery?

There have been many theories on how to optimize the swap file. The most important ones are listed below:

Making the swap file permanent (or close-ended) Moving the swap file to the outer tracks of the hard disk Creating a huge swap file

Moving the swap file to a different partition in the same hard disk

Moving the swap file to a different hard disk

I want to write that I have found the first two methods listed above to be the most efficient.

How Do We Create A Permanent Swapfile in Win9x as part of the hard drive recovery?

Luckily, Microsoft gave us a relatively painless way to create a permanent swap file though the proper directions were not included. Fear not, however. This is what guides like this are for. First, open up System Properties, either through the Control Panel or by right clicking on the My Computer icon and selecting Properties. Once in System Properties, click on the Performance tab. Right at the bottom, you’ll see a Virtual Memory button. Click on it to get the following screen: By default, it is set to ‘Let Windows manage my virtual memory settings. (Recommended)’. Ignore the Recommended label and select ‘Let me specify my own virtual memory settings’. Then, place the swap file on your “C” drive. Next up is the minimum and maximum values for the swap file. To create a permanent swap file, both values must be the same. Naturally, you’ll have to decide on a size for the swap file. I will be discussing this later in a future article but for now, let me suggest the use of an arbitrary value of 200MB.

Once you set the two values, click on OK and when Windows complains that this might be dangerous ignore it and re-boot your system. This action will create a permanent 200 MB swap file on your hard disk. To move the swap file to the beginning of the “C” drive I use Norton’s “Optimize System” utility. This does two things: first of all it moves your swap file to where you want it placed and then it optimizes the size of the Windows registry, by removing all redundant entries and then compressing it.

Once done you will need to re-boot your system. The hard driv recovery is more or less complete. Now is the time to re-install some of the applications that I might have un-installed. In order to conserve space I advise that only essential applications be installed. Once these are placed I run Norton’s Speed Disk for the last time to de-fragment the disk again. Having carried out all of the above steps, I usually find that the system is once again perky and running happily!

Please note do a search for swap file on popular search engines such as Goggle, and you should be able to get a hold of it. I hope you enjoyed my hard drive recovery guide.

Mailed by Sarfaraz - Pakistan

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