Using Nuts & Bolts To Manage A Hard Drive, Using DOS To Manage A Hard Drive

Using Nuts & Bolts To Manage A Hard Drive

Use the Nuts & Bolts Disk Tune utility to defragment your hard drive. Click the Start button, trace to Programs, then trace to and click Nuts & Bolts, and Disk Tune. Select the drive to defragment, and then click Next. When the visual presentation of your hard drive displays, answer these questions:

1. What is the first cluster number that Nuts & Bolts is accessing to defragment?

2. What is the last cluster number on your hard drive?

3. Name at least one file on your hard drive that is fragmented.

4. Name at least one file on your hard drive that is not fragmented.

Examining A Hard Drive’s BIOS Settings

From the CMOS setup information on your PC, calculate the capacity of the drive. Show your method of calculation. Write down or print all of the CMOS settings that apply to your hard drive. Explain each setting that you are able to.

Examining The First Entries At The Beginning Of A Hard Drive

1. Print out the operating system boot record of your hard drive. On the printout, label each item in the record and explain it.

2. Print out the beginning of the first FAT on your hard drive. (Hint: Use DEBUG and Print Screen.)

3. Calculate the memory location of the beginning of the second copy of the FAT. Show your method of calculation.

4. Calculate the memory location of the beginning of the root directory. Show your method of calculation.

5. Get a printout of the beginning of the root directory of your hard drive. Identify the first five entries in the root directory and the number of clusters in each entry that make up a file. For each of the five entries, explain the meaning of each ON bit in the attribute byte.

Using DOS To Manage A Hard Drive

1. Print the contents of SCANDISK.INI in the \DOS directory of your hard drive. SCANDISK.INI contains settings that SCANDISK for DOS reads and uses when it executes. The Windows 9x version of ScanDisk does not use these settings.

2. What is the setting that allows SCANDISK to delete the contents of a lost cluster without prompting you first?

3. From the INI file information, can SCANDISK repair a damaged boot sector of a compressed drive?

4. Run SCANDISK from the DOS prompt. What errors did it find?

5. From a DOS prompt, type HELP DEFRAG. What are the cautions listed concerning when not to use DEFRAG?

6. Following the directions from the Help utility, defragment a disk or hard drive using the DEFRAG utility.

7. From a DOS prompt, type HELP SMARTDRV and then print the help information about the SMARTDrive utility.

8. Look in either the CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT file of your computer for the SMARTDrive command. It should be in one or the other of the two files but not both. Using your printout, explain each option used in the command line.