How to maintain a hard disk

1. Hard disk capacity limit problem

Some old motherboards cannot support large-capacity hard drives, but this is the so-called "hard disk capacity limit problem". Here we analyze the causes of capacity limitations.

(1) Capacity limit problem

Previous engineers were designing magnetic storage products, taking into account savings and easy to implement issues, such as the use of fewer addressing areas, and this has placed a huge risk on the current hard disk capacity limit. The more famous "8.4GB capacity barrier" problem in many capacity limitation issues, because the lower version of the BIOS uses 10 bits to represent the number of cylinders, 8 bits to represent the number of heads, and 6 bits to represent sectors, which results in maximum BIOS support capacity of only 512x63x255x1024= 8.4GB, so some users who use this BIOS system will encounter the capacity problems mentioned above when they put on a large-capacity hard drive.

So Engineers in order to break through the 8.4GB capacity barrier, thought of defining a new extension INT13, extending INT13 not using the operating system's registers to pass the hard drive's addressing parameters, it uses its own address pack, which holds 64-bit LBA addresses, and if the hard drive supports LBA addressing, delivers a low 28-bit address directly to the ATA dialog box , the operating system converts the LBA address to the CHS address and then to the ATA dialog box if it is not supported. In this way, it is possible to CHS addressable maximum capacity of 136.9GB on the basis of the ATA bus, while the maximum LBA addressable capacity is 137.4GB.

(2) solve the problem of capacity limit

After the analysis of the above principle, for the "old motherboard can not identify large-capacity hard disk" problem, the direct way is to update the BIOS.

In addition to the above method of refreshing the motherboard BIOS, users can also use a number of hard disk management tools to resolve these tools from the hard disk manufacturer's official website. Users can choose the appropriate hard disk management tools according to their needs, such as the Ez-install (EZmaker.exe) in the Data Defender (lifeguard) package provided by the Western Data Company can play a certain role. According to the software Readme file: "When the user's system does not support a large-capacity hard drive, you can use the Ez-install program to partition and format the western data of the large-capacity hard disk."

2. Disk Cleanup

After the system has been running for some time, many "garbage" files will be produced. These "garbage" files are produced in a variety of reasons. For example, a user-installed program could not be uninstalled completely, leaving behind some files, or temporary files generated by the operating system. A long time, "garbage" file is more, not only will seriously affect the system performance, but also affect the normal use of the system, so users need to regularly clean the disk.

Disk Cleanup is essentially cleaning up redundant files within the system, such as dynamic-link library DLL files, temporary files downloaded from the Web, "junk" files in the Recycle Bin, and so on. Overall, it includes software installation files, software run files, software uninstall legacy files, registry files, Internet cache files, and various other temporary files.

Software installation files are generated because many software is installed, first of all, to extract their own installation files to a temporary directory, and then install in this directory. Generally speaking, when the installation is over, these temporary files will be automatically deleted, but sometimes because of the crash, sudden power failure or the software itself is not perfect design, so that these files are not deleted, left on your hard disk into a "garbage." For Windows 98 systems, these "junk" are generally kept in the C:\Windows\Temp directory, and for Windows 2000 systems, they are generally stored in C:\Documents and settings\administrator< User name >\local setting\temp, and for Windows XP systems, software installation files may be saved in the two directories described above.

There are more "junk" types of software running files, for example, WinZip temporary files have some programs that produce *.old, *.bak files. There are also some system error-checking software, such as ScanDisk or Norton Disk Doctor, the missing cluster backup files generated when checking the hard disk chklist.*, *.chk, file????. _DD, the system's help files also produce "temporary garbage", whose extensions are often *.gid, *.fts, *.FTG, and some software runs with temporary files that have a. tmp suffix.

Software uninstall legacy files are due to software uninstall, "junk" files left in the registry or system directory, such as. dll,. ini files in the Windows\System directory, and so on, this part of the "garbage" is the most difficult to clear, the use of ordinary Disk Cleanup tools will not be able to completely clean them, You must use some powerful disk tools to do this.

The "garbage" in the registry is the most complex and the most. Most Windows software will add more or less information to the registry. The weight loss of the registry is not what ordinary disk Cleanup tools can do.

The above describes the "garbage" in the Windows operating system and its causes, and some "junk" files can be done using a regular disk Cleanup program, while some "junk" must be handled with powerful tools.

There are many ways to do regular disk cleanup, and the most common is the Disk Cleanup program that comes with the Windows operating system itself. If the user wants to clean a disk, just right-click the disk, select Properties, and in the dialog box that appears, click the Disk Cleanup button and click the OK button in the dialog box that appears.

In the Disk Cleanup program, in addition to the cleanup methods described above, there are other options that the user can click on the More Options tab, which has three optional tabs. As shown in Figure 4. The first is used to clean up system components, and if the user feels that installing some system components is superfluous, you can select this option to free more hard disk space, and the Windows XP Component Wizard dialog box will pop up when you click the Clean button. The second is for removing user-installed software programs, and clicking the Clean button will eject the Add/Remove Programs dialog box under Windows XP.

The Disk Cleanup program provided by the Windows operating system is the most common disk Cleanup program that has the basic Disk Cleanup functionality, but it is not functional enough, for example, to automatically purge unwanted dynamic-link library DLL files and redundant entries in the system registry. In order to clean the disk more thoroughly without affecting the operation of the system, we also need to use other disk programs to complete.

3. Defragmentation of disk

Hard disk fragmentation is precisely called file fragmentation, which is caused by the fact that files are dispersed to different places on disk rather than continuously stored in a contiguous cluster of disks. Simply put, all of the program's read and write operations to the disk can cause fragmentation on the disk. During the daily use, users always create, delete, update the files on the disk, over time, the disk will accumulate a large number of file fragments, which will seriously affect the performance of the system, causing the waste of disk space, and even reduce the life of the disk.

Before you defragment your hard disk, it is a good idea to do a disk cleanup and then close all applications. This is because a lot of files are moved during defragmentation, and if the file is being invoked by the application, it cannot be defragmented, or an error occurs after the defragmentation completes.