Tech guys: what's your favorite disk tool?

[janas19]

I'm trying to teach myself about hard drives, and the interaction outside of a file manager or GUI. Perhaps a tool loaded off the optical.

I know about fdisk and cfdisk for creating partitions. But in terms of tools, is there anything to access/read the file system, outside of an OS explorer? Recommend me some useful tools to help HDD recovery and diagnostics.

Thank you for any help!

 

[Motorheader]

Try UBCD4Win, The Ultimate Boot CD, Clonezilla, Parted Magic (Gparted), and Slax Linux boot disk - which you can customize and add tools right at the Slax website. There are plenty of free and fee based tools and utilites out there. I find that a combination of them is always helpful to be familiar with. Have a bench machine and a couple of hard drives to practice on and for recovery purposes. Most drive manufacturers have bootable media that works outside of the OS that can run an assortment of utilities on their particular make/model of drive. The Ultimate Boot CD has some version from many manufacturers - some that aren't even in existence any longer.

 

[janas19]

Try UBCD4Win, The Ultimate Boot CD, Clonezilla, Parted Magic (Gparted), and Slax Linux boot disk - which you can customize and add tools right at the Slax website. There are plenty of free and fee based tools and utilites out there. I find that a combination of them is always helpful to be familiar with. Have a bench machine and a couple of hard drives to practice on and for recovery purposes. Most drive manufacturers have bootable media that works outside of the OS that can run an assortment of utilities on their particular make/model of drive. The Ultimate Boot CD has some version from many manufacturers - some that aren't even in existence any longer.

Thanks man! Those are some good tips

 

[pcgeek11]

Another vote for UBCD4Win...

 

[knev]

Disk partition - XP = EASEUS Partition Master, win7 has built in tool
CCleaner = clear cache and Wipe the free space on HDD