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 10 meg Yesterday |  1 gig Today! |
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| 10 meg Yesterday | 1 gig Today! |
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| Speed Up HD | Newer/Faster | MS KB Info |
| Backups | Hardware | Maintenance |
| Defraggers | Partitioners | Large Drives |
| 01-07-03 : Hitachi is buying IBM's entire hard drive business and intends to increase the capacity of the mini-drive pictured above from 1 gig to 4 gig with a 50% increase in speed by the year's end. This hardware is aimed primarilly at increased capacity for digital cameras of up to 21 megapixels soon to be released. Read more about this at InfoWorld.
Redhill: "For all the hyperbole devoted to Athlon XPs and Pentium 4s, the hard drive is still the single most important component in a computer system." W31 users should use 32 bit hard drive access. If you have installed a hard drive larger than 540 meg and W31 no longer allows you to use 32 bit hard drive access you can recover this function using your manufacturers FastDisk driver or the generic OnTrack FastDisk driver if at all possible. Add a cache utility. The newer Microsoft Smartdrv v4.2 tests well for speed when compared to other previously faster cache utilities. This cache is compatible with all versions of DOS I have tested it with and it's FREE! Tune Smartdrv using the batch file SpeedChk and the results will be much better than you might imagine. Do not use the cache utility Lightning for DOS. Although it tests well for speed and uses very little DOS memory it will eventually scramble your files. I know, I used it for many years until I discovered it was the problem and dumped it. PC-CACHE from the PCTools utilities tests well and is less likely to cause problems if you prefer, for some reason, to not use Smartdrv. PCTools is no longer sold and is not freeware, Smartdrv is free. NOTE: Reboot without the cache before running scandisk or defrag. The cache delays writes to the hard drive that can confuse these utilities - not a good thing to 'fool mother nature'. The exception would be when defrag is being done using the PCTools COMPRESS utility with PC-CACHE. They are written to work well together. I used them together for many years with no problems. Lately I have been using MSDOS Smartdrv and MSDOS defrag together with my MSDOS v6.22 and have had no problems. Used Hard drives of less than 2 gig in size are in the $8-$10 price range now. There is a minimum amount to motivate the person selling them to package them and ship them to you and $8-$10 seems to be that minimum. Keep in mind that W31 may refuse to use the 32 bit hard drive access if you exceed the 540 meg hard drive size limitation of W31. As a DOS user even 500 meg hard drives are quite large, I use three 850 meg drives and alternate them for backups ($8 each - used). If you are using drives smaller than 500 meg consider looking around for something larger. Not only will you have more room for your installs, the newer larger drives were getting faster at the same time as they grew in size. If your hard drive controller has a buffer smaller than 2 meg consider replacing that as well. TEKRAM is an inexpensive brand of hard drive controller with a very good reputation as of 2003. CENDYNE buys whatever it can get cheaply then puts their 'brand' on it - sort of a grab bag of hardware. I would avoid CENDYNE unless you recognize the circuit board and chips as being from a reputable manufacturer. When adding Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, etc. to a DOS only setup there will be a need for empty space to be used as a Virtual Memory Swap file by the other OS (seems a universal need for all other OS). Even W31 needs this swap space approximately 4 times the size of installed memory. W31 is hard-coded to never use more than one-half the available space. A 16 meg W31 install needs a 128 meg empty partition or it will refuse to create a 64 meg Virtual Memory Swap file. 32 bit Windows (W9x,WinME,NT,W2k,XP, etc.) will install at just under 1 gig (full install) and with the additional memory they require there is also a requirement for 4 times that amount of memory of empty hard drive space for a swap file (no requirement that the partition is twice that size - thank goodness). Recent distributions of Linux are said to install closer to 2 gigs (full install) etc. etc. This all needs to be planned for when you are at the begining partitioning your new hard drive. Patitioning the hard drive should involve C:, D:, and E: partitions as a minimum. The C: partition for the OS, D: for the Virtual Memory Swap file, and E: for all other data and temporary files. As a DOS-only user this could be C: and D: but why not plan ahead and create E: for future expansion? You may give in to the temptation of having a GUI browser or want to do some complex graphics manipulations and need to add a newer OS. The VM swap file is best locked into it's own partition where it cannot fragment other files and doesn't have to be hopped over to access files installed after or before the VM swap file was created. The best arrangement is to get the fastest hard drive you can find and slave that as the container for the VM swap file but we can't always have the 'best' arrangement. I reset to a temporary swap file then format the entire swap partition and reset back to a permanent swap file on a regular basis. It seems to help. Backups are much easier when the data files that are changing constantly are all in one partition. Often the OS does not need a 'fresh' backup if nothing has been reconfigured since the previous backup. When my VM swap file was on drive C: I have inadvertently backed up the VM swap file which is generally a waste of space.
Hard Drive Information - MS Knowledgebase
How* do we get around some of these lmitations? Backups aren't done on a regular basis because it's time consuming and people tend to be optimistic until it's too late. Grandfather, father, son: This refers to three continuously alternating backups. How you store the backups makes no difference. CD burners, tape, ZIP drive, or diskettes all should be done in three's. I have had to use all three sets of backups to restore a hard drive when using diskettes because different disks age at different times and each set had one or more unreadable diskettes in them. It happens and tape can be even worse. Arrange your files into separate partitions: New systems are configured with one huge C: drive. This is a mistake and very unprofessional of whoever set up your system. A disaster waiting to happen and not the most efficient (read fastest) setup either. Reduce the monotony by using separate partitions and keep the system files in one partition and data files in another. A separate partition for the virtual memory swap file for Windows is a way to avoid fragmentation of the hard drive and the mistake of backing up the swap file. I've done it a few times myself. For a system using any version of Windows the minimum would be C: for system files, D: to hold the virtual memory swap file, and E: for changing data files and %TEMP% files that should be deleted before making any backups. Once you have three backups of the system partition you only need to make new backups of the C: drive if you reconfigure your system files by installing new applications or just decide to tweak it a bit. With only the changing data files to backup the amount of time required won't overwhelm you. Backup to what?: First the don'ts. Do not just copy your directories to the same hard drive and consider that a backup. If the FAT (File Allocation Table) is scrambled either by a mistake or a virus your so-called backup is gone along with the original. Keeping a second copy for convenience when uninstalls fail is not a bad idea but it's not really a backup. The "Go Back" of WinME makes copies onto the same hard drive and this is not what I refer to as a backup. Do not backup your files to some orphaned magnetic media that requires your computer hardware to function. Your computer or the special drive to read the media may die leaving you with unreadable magnetic media. This happens most frequently with tape drives. Do not depend on XCOPY.EXE to make backups. It has a few bugs like not wanting to copy empty directories or hidden files. I know newer versions have added some of this but get a real backup program written to do backups. There are applications for this purpose that won't skip any files or directories. Do not attempt to make backup archives using Pkzip or WinZip or any other 'zip' utility. There is no error recovery of these archives if/when they are damaged - yes I know about PkzipFix but at best it will retrieve only the undamaged files and dump the damaged files. Not a workable 'fix' in my opinion. Pkzip uses the last diskette volume to hold the entire directory for all of the other diskettes when using Pkzip to make backups. If this disk is lost or damaged the other disks are unuseable! Restoring just a few of these backed up files requires you to read from the last volume (disk) first and then from the first volume until you reach the disk with the required files to restore. Very awkward and time consuming. The sturdiest and cheapest backups are to CD writers. Good but not many older 16 BIT OS systems have these installed. The next best option is to have four identical hard drives with one of them as the working drive (master) and three others for backups (slave). Install the other three, one at a time, as the second hard drive (slave) in your system then backup to this slave from your working master drive, remove the backed up drive (master) and put the drive you just copied all of the files to (slave) in it's place as the new master drive. The master you just copied from becomes the 'backup' that you store and the copy is used as the working drive. This way you can boot to your 'backup' and use it to test that it is, in fact, a working backup with all required files. You already know the drive you copied from is OK. This way you automatically test each of your backup copies. Now install the second drive using the next identical drive. With all the gigabyte drives out there the older/smaller drives are very cheap. The added bonus is that this is fast and you can do the entire backup unattended. You don't need to watch it, just run it and each 'backup' is fully tested because you are running on the most recent one each time. If this sounds like too much trouble, the next best option is to install a second hard drive as large or larger than your first (main) hard drive and backup to that as many times as the drive can manage and overwrite the oldest version each time giving you a sort of grandfather, father, son backup system. Not as foolproof but better than no backups at all. If none of the above is doable then you only have tape or diskettes to make your backups. If you have the empty space on your hard drive using RAR or JAR with the `solid archive' option turned on will make the backup files smaller in size but both archivers are slow in my opinion. Once these backup volumes are created copy them to tape or disk. As an absolute minimal effort backup your system files. The root directory (C:\), the DOS directory (I use C:\DOS) and any utility directories. If you use W3x the 16 BIT Windows then also backup C:\WINDOWS and C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM. You'll be glad you did some dark and dreary day when your hard drive is trashed.
MS-DOS and Windows 95 use the FDISK utility to partition a disk. When it accesses a hard disk, FDISK uses the system AT ROM BIOS INT13h interface, which has a maximum of 1024 cylinders, 255 heads, and 63 sectors per track. FDISK can access any drive within the limits imposed by the AT ROM BIOS, which means that FDISK can access drives of up to 8 GB, calculated as follows:
The original IDE hardware interface is limited to 16 heads, which reduces the maximum drive size to 540 MB. Newer IDE (ATAPI) technology, however, uses a translation scheme called Logical Block Addressing (LBA) to exceed the 540 MB limit as imposed by the system AT ROM BIOS and IDE specification. SCSI and ESDI hard drive controllers use similar translation methods that are usually built into the controller card's ROM BIOS to exceed the 540 MB size limit. For more information about the use of large hard disks with MS-DOS and Windows 95/98, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: ARTICLE-ID: 126855 TITLE: Windows Support for Large IDE Hard Disks The FDISK utility in MS-DOS and the retail release of Windows 95 can create an extended partition larger than 2 GB. FDISK can then create multiple formatted drives of up to 2 GB in this extended partition that conform to the AT ROM BIOS constraints mentioned earlier. FDISK does not, however, allow the creation of a primary FAT16 partition or logical FAT16 drives in an extended partition that is larger than 2 GB. Note also that, as mentioned earlier, logical drives larger than 540 MB cannot be accessed using MS-DOS or Windows 95 unless LBA or geometry translation is used. Restoring 32 bit hard drive access to Windows v3.1/3.11 when using hard drives larger than 540 meg (WFWG doesn't need help).
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| © Charles Angelich 2002 |
