TestDisk is a powerful free data recovery utility. TestDisk was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally erasing your Partition Table).

TestDisk is a free and useful program which queries the BIOS ( DOS/Win9x) or the OS ( Linux, FreeBSD) in order to find the Hard Disks and their characteristics ( LBA size and CHS geometry). TestDisk does a quick check of your disk´s structure and compares it with your Partition Table for entry errors. If the Partition Table has entry errors, TestDisk can repair them. If you have missing partitions or a completely empty Partition Table, TestDisk can search for partitions and create a new Table or even a new MBR if necessary.

However, it´s up to the user to look over the list of possible partitions found by TestDisk and to select the one(s) which were being used just before the drive failed to boot or the partition(s) were lost. In some cases, especially after initiating a detailed search for lost partitions, TestDisk may show partition data which is simply from the remnants of a partition that had been deleted and overwritten long ago.

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HD Tune is a hard disk utility which has the following functions:

* Benchmark: measures the raw performance
* Transfer Rate
* Access Time
* CPU Usage
* Burst Rate
* Hard Disk information which includes firmware version, serial number, disk capacity, buffer size, transfer mode
* Hard Disk Health
* S.M.A.R.T. Information (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology)
* Temperature
* Power On Time
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* Copy screenshot to clipboard

DriveImage XML is an easy to use and reliable application for imaging and backing up partitions and logical drives.

Image creation uses Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Services (VSS), allowing you to create safe “hot images” even from drives currently in use.

Images are stored in XML files, allowing you to process them with 3rd party tools. Never again be stuck with a useless backup!

Restore images to drives without having to reboot.

The program will backup, image and restore drives formatted with FAT 12, 16, 32 and NTFS.

Here are some key features of “DriveImage XML”:

· Backup logical drives and partitions to image files
· Browse these images, view and extract files
· Restore these images to the same or a different drive
· Copy directly from drive to drive

Drive Manager makes it easy to retrieve drive information for all your drives at a glance. It runs as a standalone EXE file and displays Label, Type, Size, Used, Available, Format, Serial number and Percentage free for each local and removable drive. The information is refreshed every 10 seconds - double-clicking opens the drive in Windows Explorer. You can also hide drives from explorer.What’s New:

• SMART information for hard disks.
• Disk information and flags.
• CD/DVD information and drive capabilities

If you have lots of drive letters of different types of drives, such as mapped network drives, thumb drive (USB memory sticks), smart media and compact flash, CD-ROM and DVD then this utility is perfect to help you manage them.

Drive Manager has been written to help you easily identify drives which are of the same type. As well as displaying the volume label it also displays vendor information so that multiply CD/DVD drives and removable drives such as USB thumb drives can be differentiated by their manufacturers name, version and revision date. Also the serial number can be seen as a unique ID for each drives.

freeware disk reporting tool for Windows. You can use Disktective to trace used space within your harddisk and directories. Disktective can handle 10 Gb or more. With Disktective you can find out the real size of your directories and disks - and see how used space is distributed inside them. Disktective creates reports, prints pie charts, exports to HTML and TreePad files. Also: Windows XP themes, toolbar, online manual, downloadable manual, zero-install

Harddisk Search & Stats is a very powerful Search Engine for your harddisk which is free for commercial and non-commercial use. It enables you to conveniently search large numbers of text/ascii-based files simultaneously (such as: .txt, .html, .ini, .php, .mbx, .pas, .bas, .c, .cpp files). Harddisk Search & Stats is ideal for those who are handling text files, such as programmers, web developers, computer professionals, system managers and other demanding users. An advantage of Harddisk Search & Stats is that - unlike most other search engines - it does perform any time-consuming indexing of your harddisk. It can directly search text-based files in all levels of a folder (recursive), or just one level, or your entire harddisk. Harddisk Search & Stats Search can search inside files, and search for files (using the file name) or combine both methods. When searching inside files, you can specify as many search terms you want, and there is no limit to the number of file types you can add for searching. For each search-term entered, the program will display an additional column in the search results.

Here are some key features of “HDCleaner”:

· Scan and Clean the junk files
· Scan for duplicate files
· Clean Recent Documents
· Clean Run… Dialog List
· Clean Find Document List
· Clean Find Computer List
· Clean URLs in IE Address Bar
· Clean URLs in Shell Address Bar
· Clean Media Player Recent URLs
· Clean WinZip Recent Files
· Clean WinZip Extract To Folders
· Clean Paint Recent Files
· Clean WordPad Recent Files
· Clean Recycle Bin
· It optimizes registry by deleting unused entries
· Manage Windows’ add/remove software listing
· Scanning For Disk Errors (only NT and higher)
· Shows some intresting info about your disk space usage
· Wipe Free Space
· Deletes with DOD 5220.22-M Standard
· StartUp Tuner
· TreeSize Information
· DIRTOHTML - generate html or text index of current directory

Disk fragmentation leads to system slowdowns, PC crashes, slow startup and shutdown and sometimes to system failures. Auslogics Disk Defrag is designed for fast optimization of today’s modern hard disks. Get the maximum performance out of your expensive hardware investments. And it’s absolutely FREE.

Hard disks are by far the slowest component in your computer. CPU and memory work much faster than hard disks because they do not have moving parts. Therefore fragmented disks often become a bottleneck of the system performance.

Besides causing slowdowns, fragmentation makes the hard drive disk heads move frequently when reading files which leads to freeze-ups and system crashes.

DuBaron DiskImage is the new software tool used to backup and restore partitions, entire hdd, usb key, floppy drive and optical media.

DiskImage features built-in zip compression, it’s own compression method for data > 2Gb, MD5 and SHA1 checksumming, a hex editor, and various tools like drive speed and seek testing.

Dumping and restoring partitions, usb sticks, floppies, optical media, diskimage is the swiss army knife.