USB removable disks (also known as flash drives or “Disk on Key” and other variations) are quickly becoming an integral part of our electronic life, and now nearly everybody owns one device or another, in forms of small disks, external hard drives that come enclosed in cases, card readers, cameras, mobile phones, portable media players…
Microsoft Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 offer two types of disk storage: basic and dynamic. Basic Disk Storage Basic storage uses normal partition tables supported by MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows 95, Microsoft Windows 98, Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition (Me), Microsoft Windows NT, Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP. A disk…
When you make frequent writes and deletions from your hard disk your disks will become fragmented with time. Fragmentation of the disks will result in lower I/O performance. In order to prevent loss of performance over time, it is best to perform routine defragmentations of your hard disks. Manual defragmentation of you disks is possible…
If you format many floppy disks you know how tedious it is to get to the Format command. You have to first open either Windows Explorer or My Computer, then right-click on the floppy disk drive icon, and select the Format command from the shortcut menu. You can shorten this three-step procedure into a single…
Your computer stores its data on hard disk(s). Disks can accumulate a lot of un-used files, old temporary files, temporary Internet files, old setup files and more. Keeping your disks clean and tidy is a task that can be done manually (by those of you who know what to delete – not any file can…
You can use this utility to enable storage configuration from a either a script, a remote session, or another command prompt. DISKPART enhances the Disk Administrator graphical user interface (GUI). DISKPART enables a superset of the actions that are supported by the Disk Management snap-in. The Disk Management snap-in prohibits you from inadvertently performing actions…
Daniel Petri shows you how to block the use of USB drives on client machines by using Group Policy Objects (GPO).
Sometimes you want to delete a file but when you do so an error message pops and tells you it cannot be done. Method #1 – Kill explorer.exe Do successfully delete an undeletable file that is caught be the explorer.exe process (and most of them are) do the following: Open a Command Prompt window and…
Neither Windows 2000 nor Windows (yuck) ME has the ability to create a simple, basic, DOS- based boot floppy (a “startup disk”). In Windows XP however, the floppy format option in My Computer an offer to “Create MS-DOS Startup Disk” is present. If you try to boot your computer with this floppy you will be…
In W2K, XP and Windows Server 2003, if you attempt to convert a File Allocation Table (FAT or FAT16) partition to the FAT32 file system using the “drive:’convert drive: /fs:fat32” command-line switch, where drive is the drive from which you are running the convert utility and the drive you are trying to convert to FAT32,…