Number 290 - July 2007

How I Lost 33% of My Hard Drive - And How I Recovered It
by Jacques Blum, LACS
Until very recently, my only computer was a Sony Vaio notebook purchased in 1999. It works with a Pentium II at the dizzying speed of 333 KHZ, came with 64 MB of RAM that, in a short time, I cranked up to the max of 192 MB. The hard drive has a sinfully-wasting capacity of 6.4 GB. Sony had the generosity of also installing a floppy drive and a CD-DVD ROM drive on it, and everything running more or less happily under Windows 98. Shortly after I had adopted the machine --for a king's ransom--I upgraded to Windows 98 SE. Tempus fugit and so does the available free space on the hard drive after a few years of accumulating very important (so it seemed) information that I seldom look at. If ever.    In April 2005, I noticed that the Hard Drive contained about 4+ GB of programs and data and approximately 2 GB of free space. I quickly figured that my notebook had already passed its half-life and that in another 5 years or so it would require major surgery--like a new and perhaps somewhat larger Hard Drive--if it ever survives the intervention...    I quickly moved some of my files to CDs, followed by a defrag, all of which relieved the pressure, and the C:\ properties revealed that the Hard Drive was more in balance with about 3+/- GB of stuff and 3 GB of free space.    Before doing anything further, I decided to save my whole Hard Drive, i.e. to image it; and after reading some of Fred Langa's advice I purchased Acronis True Image 8.0. All of this happening about a year and a half ago, way before I knew that, some day, Sheldon Shallon and Paula Van Berkom would do an in-depth presentation on Acronis True Image. Obviously, I ran into trouble.    My goal was to image the hard drive on 6 or perhaps 7 CDs. I do not know what I did but after letting Acronis do its thing for awhile, before any CD burning even started, a message popped up on the screen telling me that Acronis was aborting the operation. I probably did some stupid thing, and I suppose that it may be due to the fact that I had approached the whole operation with a lot of aplomb and even more assumptions. Lesson: do not assume, even if you are sure that you know what the program does, just follow the instructions!	In any case, my whole system was in a mess; even the MBR* had been changed. Who done it? I immediately accused Acronis, and even had a few unkind words for myself. It took me a long time to get the system up again. And when I checked the C:\properties, I had the unpleasant surprise to fmd that the hard drive now had about 3+ GB of stuff and only 1 GB of free space, for a total of 4 GB. No trace of the other 2 GB. I had no clue where to find the missing 2 GB. I ended up moving some more files to CDs until my 4 GB were about evenly split between my stuff and free space. Needless to say, I was pretty miserable about this situation.    Then, back to Fred Langa. I read, or rather re-read, Langa's unbound enthusiasm for a program called BootIt. In his words, First, BootIt NG is a boot manager. It allows you to install a mix of operating systems...and then boot whichever you want. Second, BootIt NG is a partition manager. You can create, format, move, resize (nondestructively), and delete partitions at will, without disturbing the surrounding ones. Third, BootIt NG is a disk imager; you can create compact, compressed images of any or all partitions on your hard drive, regardless of which OS they are holding, and place the image files where you want. BootIt NG supports direct writing to many common CD/DVD+R/+RW/-R/-RW drives..."    Last July, I finally made up my mind to give BootIt NG a try.I had paid $40.00 for Acronis, with no luck. I plunked down another $35.00 for BING, as BootIt NG is affectionately called by its fans. Lo and behold! This thing works. I saw the missing 2 GB, just called partition. Here were the 2 missing GB that Acronis had spirited away and BING let me slide them to join my own free space. My hard drive is back to 6 GB.    I have not yet tried BING in its other junctions, but as a partition manager, hats off! One of these days, I will try its imaging capabilities, that which I messed up with Accronis.    Copied from the January 2007 CCCC, newsletter of the Central Coast Computer Club, Santa Clara, CA.    * MBR = Master Boot Record
Number 290 - July 2007