If you have a hard drive with some unallocated space on the end of (i.e. not currently assigned to a partition) and want to use that space to add to an existing partition, a simple and effective tool you can use is Diskpart. This tool is included with Windows XP and later.

The documentation is pretty easy to follow, but for example suppose you want to extend the size of your E drive with some empty space on the end:

1. Make sure you have your data backed up (just in case)
2. Open a command prompt as the Administrator
3. Type ‘diskpart’
4. Type ‘list disk’ to get the disk number of the drive
5. Type ’select disk=[disk#]‘
6. Type ‘list partition’ to get the partition number of the partition to extend
7. Type ’select partition=[partition#]‘
8. Type ‘extend’
9. Once the command completes, your E drive is now resized to include the additional empty space

Note: You cannot use this to resize the active system drive (usually C), so if you do need to resize your C drive, you would need to remove the hard drive from the computer and plug it into another computer where it is not the C drive. Once you do this you can then resize it.

This also works in virtual machines, so you can use this in combination with the VHD Resizer tool to completely manage your VHD files.

While there are certainly more user friendly and feature-rich products available, this tool does the job quickly and easily.

I saw an interesting post on Slashdot not too long ago where someone asked the a question regarding a RAID setup. What I found interesting was not so much their question, rather the comments from the replies.

If you are considering using RAID in your setup, this is a great thread to read. One commenter put it best:

[T]he reason for using RAID is NOT as a backup. RAID != Backup.
RAID is for redundancy and performance increases.

This is a great point. RAID will protect you from drive failures but is not a backup solution as if you lose your data on one drive, you have lost it on all of them.

Personally, I don’t see a need for an end user machine to really have a RAID setup as it is expensive and not cost effective for performance gains when compared to better hardware.

Does anyone have any personal experience or thoughts on this?

One thing I have noticed when reading some articles across the Internet regarding data destruction is many recommendations are on the ‘paranoid level’. I have seen articles/forum posts where people talk about 0 writing their hard drive 5+ times and then taking it apart and smashing the disks. First of all, 99.999% of the data out there is worthless to anyone except the owner and second, 99.999% of people who would try to steal this data would pick the ‘low hanging fruit’ where they find a drive which has data on it and exploit it.

The point of this is simply if you are getting rid of a hard drive with important data on it, 0 writing it one time is enough. I’ve written a tip about this in the past which references the Ultimate Boot CD as a great resource for easily getting access to the tools you need.

Let’s be realistic, nobody is going to be running your hard drive through rediculously sophisticated and expensive hardware to try to steal your data.

Hard drives can die at any time, but typically you get some kind of warning from sounds they make. Usually any sound that a hard drive makes, other than a spinning noise of course, is bad. Here is an interesting page from a data recovery company which gives various sounds from different brands of hard drives which are dying.

Some (obvious) advice from their web site:

These are some typical sounds we hear in our data recovery lab. If your hard drive makes noises like these and you are still able to access your files – backup immediately.

One other thing to note on this page:

If you want to use these sounds in your music (yes, we have received lots of requests already) – no problem, but please contact us first.

So be on the lookout for some dying hard drive music…

As you probably know, your hard drive is the most important and fragile component of your computer. Since it houses all your data, your system basically “lives and dies” by the health of your hard drive.

Perhaps the most important indicator in a hard drive is the S.M.A.R.T. check which is built in to virtually all models. This check is a way for your hard drive to warn you that something is wrong. The problem is a lot of systems only show S.M.A.R.T. checks at bootup, which really doesn’t do too much good. This is where Seagate’s SeaTools for Windows come into play.

SeaTools, obviously, checks Seagate drives, but also any hard drive which has S.M.A.R.T. monitoring. This makes SeaTools ideal for systems with multiple hard drives as you can check the health of each device from a single location. Additionally, you can perform non-destructive tests on drives in order to full test their health.

While there are other programs out there which do the same thing, I have found SeaTools to be just right for basic hard disk diagnostics from the convenience of Windows.