APCO 2P01 Lab 7

Objective

Installation and maintenance of a Hard Drive in a Windows system. This lab will also focus on partitioning and file structures in the windows system.


Exercise 1 (30 Min)


The following lab assumes that you will be removing a HD from 1 computer and installing it into a second for data recovery. You will be given a second HD. Install this drive and assume it to be the Work Station 1 drive. It is assumed to be blank. Enter disk manager, control panel -> Admin Tools. remove existing partitions, and create 1 NTFS partition equal to the size of the system drive of disk 0. Proceed to copy the Recovery folder to the new partition on the installed drive. Create the recovery folder asked for in the following lab on this newly installed drive.

Complete Lab 5.3. See above for lab modifications.

Once Installed do not remove the drive, until asked to do so in Exercise 4.


Exercise 2 (30 Min)


Complete Lab 5.1.

You can find HD_Tune255  in the supplemental s/w section of the course home page.

Rerun the Health and diagnostics on the 2nd HD installed in Exercise 1.

Which disk performed better? Why?


Exercise 3 (30 Min)


Complete Lab 5.2.

Exercise 4 (40 min)

Hard Drive manufactures will be bought out by various other manufactures, e.g. Maxtor is now owned by Seagate. You will also find that some drive manufactures will upgrade or discontinue diagnostic software, or that older drives will cease to be supported. Be warned.

Remove the 2nd HD and connect the CD as before.

Complete Lab 5.4.  The DOS & Windows version of Seatools will detect and analyze the WD drives. However, often when a HD goes south, the OS is in a non functional state. Disk diagnostics should be run from a CD or Floppy which does not rely on the HD.

The UBD_CD contains a veriety of Disk Diagnostics. Complete the exercise using the appropriate Disk Tool. You may skip downloading and/or completion of the sections which do not apply directly to your drive.

Other resources: consider the following link http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287. Here you will find disk diagnostic utilities for the various manufactures which may be more up to date then those on the CD. All disk diagnostic utilities work much the same way.

Exercise 5 (20 min)

Create 2 NTFS partitions on the 1st hard drive, each about 1 Gig in size. Format each partition to drive letters M & N. Do this using Disk Manager from Windows.

Run Parted Magic from the UBD CD.


The primary disk should be identified from its model number. Use Parted Magic to list the characteristics of the drive. What are the drive characteristics of drive 0.







One common problem many computer users have is creating system partitions which are too small. After a period of time the partition becomes full, the system grinds to a halt. Parted Magic was a utility developed to dynamically reallocate the size of a partition without the need to reformat (i.e. lose the information). Obviously, this was received with welcome in the IT community.

Using Parted Magic, how much unallocated space is on the drive? Logically, where is this free space?






Use Parted Magic to increase the size of partition M to use all unallocated disk space. Consider that M & N are physically adjacent to one another. In a case such as this, you will need to move partition N up first, then increase the size of M.


Run Disk Health and investigate the hard disk. Do not perform any destructive tests, you will loose your OS.