External drive no longer accessible

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A user will plug in an external hard drive and back off all of their important data to that drive in preparation of a format/reload of windows.
They then reboot the machine and boot from their Windows cd. They begin by deleting the primary partition on the boot drive and then formatting with NTFS. They go through the entire windows load with out incident.
Finally in windows they go to My Computer only to see that the external drive is no longer accessible.
Never leave any drive, except the one you are installing windows too, connected to the machine while you are reloading Windows.
There are 2 different problems here:

1. The drive still has a drive letter but it will throw the error “The drive is not formatted would you like to format it now?”.
2. The drive has no drive letter at all and in Disk Management it will say the drive is unallocated or raw.

There is a couple of ways to fix the problem, the first one is to get Recover IT All Professional and allow the software to find your files. You can then mark them and move them off. The problem with this option is that it requires a lot of transferring of files, and you may miss some. The other way to do it would be to have DTI Data Recovery remote into your computer and repair the problem remotely. With a hex editor I can put the drive back to the way it was before this happened. This is a nice option and limits the down time to the user.

If you are restoring Windows because of a hard drive failure, you may need hard drive recovery.
Don’t use Windows restore CD’s if your hard drive is clicking, or isn’t seen by the BIOS.

Searching For Files

... on File Hosting Sites with Google

File hosting services like Rapidshare, Megaupload or SendIt allow anyone to post up files for others to find and use. While this is useful for sending files too large for e-mail attachments, the sites usually offer an anonymous uploading system which prevents users from searching through the file hosting host’s databases to find files directly.
The logic behind this is obvious: File Hosting sites are not intended as a full-on hosting service, and were it to provide it’s files in a searchable manner, bandwidth costs would skyrocket. Additionally, software pirates and other persons wishing to covertly acquire digital content they have no right to would be able to quickly and easily find such data which has been uploaded by equally unscrupulous persons.
But what if you are just looking for a free game, a movie preview, or a file you downloaded a month ago and accidentally deleted? Luckily, using the power of Google, you can root through file hosting services to find files. All you have to do is tell Google to look through the site for you. To do this all you need to do is type the following into Google’s search bar:
site:url “[Term]“

If you replace [term] with whatever you are looking for, Google will root through the url that you specified in search of files that either have the term in their filename or their description. This will permit you to easily and quickly root through file hosting sites in search of specific files when you know exactly what you are looking for, such as the preview to an upcoming movie or the demo version of a specific game.

If you’ve got a more general idea of what you want, it may be a good idea to have Google search the sites for specific filetypes. To do this for music files, enter the following into the Google search bar:
+inurl:wma|mp3|ogg site:url
This will tell Google to search the site for the most popular sort of music files.

If you want to search for videos, enter:
+inurl:avi|mpg|wmv site:url

And if you want to search for just archives in general, enter:
+inurl:exe|rar|zip site:url

Each of these methods isn’t foolproof. You will invariably end up with a large number of files you do not want, and it will take awhile to root through the results to find what you are interested in. Also it is important to be aware that since file hosting sites are quick and anonymous that not all files will be properly labeled or even safe.

Dropbox

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Dropbox is the easiest way to share and store your files online.
Dropbox uses a combination of software client and web client which provide both access to the files unlike normal file hosts like Rapidshare who provide no way to sync files across computers.

The software client basically uses one source folder on the hard drive where all the files and folders are stored in locally. Uploading files is just a matter of moving files and folders into the Dropbox zone on the computer or by creating and editing files already in that special folder.

When the Dropbox client is running the files and folders will get automatically synced with the online client which keeps the most recent copies of the files and folders including file revisions. The web client of DropBox can be used to download or view files without having to run the software client. The client can also be used to upload new files to the service.

Dropbox currently has a 2 Gigabyte limit for every user which is definitely enough for many purposes. One of the interesting features of Dropbox is being able to share a folder with another person. It pretty much works the same as sharing a folder between different computers.

Wireless Lags in Vista and XP

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Wireless lags can be problematic in various situations. This includes during multimedia streams, live feeds but also gaming. This wireless problem can range from stutters to serious connection problems and even drops. This is causes by a service in Windows XP and Windows Vista that is regularly looking for new wireless networks. The service is called Wireless Zero Configuration in Windows XP and WLAN Auto Config in Windows Vista. The easiest way to check if the problem exists on a computer system is to ping a service for some time to see if there are any wireless lags.
To do that open a Windows command prompt with the shortcut [Windows R] [cmd] [enter] and type in the command ping -t www.google.com. This will ping Google and display the time it takes. If you see spikes like in the screenshot below you are experiencing wireless lags.

The easiest way to fix wireless lags is by downloading and running Wireless Zero Shutdown when running Windows XP or Vista Anti Lag when running Windows Vista.

Running either of the software programs will stop the Windows service from scanning for new wireless networks regularly as soon as a wireless connection has been established.

Prevent Power Saving Mode

.. of external Hard Drive

Some external hard drives that are connected via USB, eSATA or Firewire to a computer system have the annoying habit of going into power saving mode after ten to fifteen minutes. While this is not problematic at the time it becomes so when it leaves the power saving mode as this causes a system wide lag while waiting for the external hard drives to spool up. There are two possibilities why the hard drive is entering power saving mode.

The first possibility can be found in the power options of the computer system. Hard drives can be set to enter power saving mode after a certain time. Turning that option off might fix the problem on the computer system.

The second possibility is that the power saving mode is hardcoded in the external hard drive. There is no way of turning that mode off in the Windows operating system. The only possibility are third party tools that prevent these external hard drives from going into power saving mode.

XSleep is a portable computer software program that can prevent power saving mode of up to four external hard drives. The hard drives can be selected by path in the main program window. The method used to prevent power saving mode is to keep the hard drives busy in regular intervals. The default interval is set to two minutes. The setting can be changed in the interface as well.

It can also disable autorun and disable itself outside working hours. It has been designed by the software developer as a customized alternative to No Sleep HD

RapidShare downloader

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RapidDownload is a light, powerful and fast Rapidshare downloader. The program size is only 15Kb !! It needs almost no processor resources while it downloads your files from Rapidshare.
If you tried to use Rapidshare before to download files, then you know all the hassle you need to go thru, as a free user, just to download a couple of files! RapidDownload was created using the Assembly Language art of programming. It is small and fast and it will automate all the actions that a free user has to do to download from Rapidshare.
RapidDownload does for FREE what other downloaders CAN'T do for money.
With RapidDownload you get the files you want and nothing else. Is that simple.
RapidDownload clean and simple interface strongly contradicts the present software trend among software producers, with monstruous file sizes and hidden "features". The Rapidshare Download program size is only 15 KBytes !

Quick and complete example of working with Rapidshare Downloader

• Get RapidDownload to your computer
• Unzip the program to a directory of your choice. NOTE: This program does not need any installing, it will just works!
• Search Rapidshare for links that you want to download
• Create a file "downloads.txt" and copy all those links in that file
• Start Rapidshare Downloader and take a break from the computer (go outside having fun, playing, shoping, etc., just use your imagination for that part...)
• When you return home, surprise!, all files that you wanted are downloaded to a directory named "downloads" from the directory where Rapidshare Downloader was started!

• If you found just too many links in one webpage to copy them by hand (maybe in a forum), do not worry! Save that html page in RapidDownload's directory and rename it "downloads.txt"
• Start Rapidshare Download and, yesss!, it also understands html very well! It will just look in that html file and will download all the Rapidshare links from it!

• You have many files to download and some of them have the same filename. What to do then? RapidDownload knows if a file already exists, and will autorename the newer files so that you will have all of them!

• You have many files to download and you closed RapidDownload before all of them got downloaded. What to do now? Rapidshare Downloader knows that a URL was already downloaded, and will continue next time exactly from where it left!
  From where got RapidDownload the secret knowledge to skip the already downloaded files? The answer is in "history.dat" wich is created by RapidDownload and wich stores all Rapidshare URL links succesfully downloaded.

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