First, I want to thank you for the opportunity to speak to this group tonight. I will be showing you some of the exciting hard drive utility products from PowerQuest Corporation, but before I get to that ...

I would like to spend a few minutes sharing with you some suggestions for Organizing your Hard Drive and Running Multiple Operating Systems from it. We also will discuss briefly what you should do to properly protect your hard drive from failure. Then, as time permits, I’ll introduce you to the PowerQuest family of hard drive utilities and even demonstrate one or two of them for you.

I have a handout that you can take with you that contains a summary of all of the suggestions I will be covering tonight. In addition, you can view this entire slide set and read my comments about each slide on the web at www.ugr.com. Take the Products link to a page that will link to these slides.

Your hard drive is the only part of your computer system that you can tailor exactly to fit your personal needs. Many of us do not know we can do this or what are the best ways to organize our hard drive. In this section of my presentation, I’m going to offer you 10 suggestions on how to organize your hard drive. I hope that you’ll find one or more of these suggestions of interest to you and that you’ll better understand how you can setup your hard drive.

The first suggest is to not be satisfied with just one hard drive, but to install on your system a second hard drive. This will improve the performance of your system, let you backup one hard drive to the other, and give you many more options for organizing your hard drives than a single drive will offer you. Adding a second hard drive to your system is fairly inexpensive today. If you watch the prices a bit, you can find a 30-40 GB hard drive for $99. And adding a second hard drive is fairly easy to do or you can pay your retailer a few dollars to do it for you. To know which hard drives are the best and which models to avoid, I would suggest you check out the web site of www.driveservice.com. They offer their opinions of good and bad hard drives. In the rest of this presentation, I will assume that you have taken this first step of adding a second hard drive, although you can really do most of the following suggestions on a single hard drive system as well. I’ll show you an example of a single drive system later in this presentation.

Next I suggest you convert any FAT partitions that you still have on your hard drive to FAT32. The old FAT file system was not very efficient in storing files on large partitions. FAT32 is much more efficient at doing this. Besides, you were limited to partition sizes of only 2GB with the old FAT file system. FAT32 can handle much larger partition sizes. In addition, you are getting the latest technology when you use the newer FAT32 file system. PartitionMagic has conversion routines that will safely convert your FAT partitions to FAT32 partitions in a couple of minutes. Just be sure your Operating System can handle FAT32 before you convert your partitions. Win95B, Win98, WinMe, and Win2000 all handle the FAT32 file system.

Some users have the mistaken belief that once they convert to the FAT32 file system that all of their wasted space problems are gone. This is not true. Even using the FAT32 file system you have to be careful of large partitions. This partition table shows you what I mean. If you make your new 40GB hard drive all one large partition under FAT32, then your cluster size will be 32K. That means that each file you store on your hard drive will take a minimum of 32K of hard drive space. So, a small 2K file will take the entire cluster of 32K to be stored. With the typical sized files that you and I use on our hard drives, that could mean a waste of up to 40% of that hard drive. So, if you thought you were buying a 40GB hard drive, you may find that you can only use about 24GB of that hard drive. The solution is to keep your FAT32 partitions on your hard drive under 8GB in size. If you do this, then you will only waste less than 4% of the hard drive space. This is very efficient.

Recommendation number 4 is to intelligently divide up your hard drives into meaningful partitions that are less than 8 GB in size. Before we start to recommend what you will use the different partitions for, let me review with you the types of partitions that you can have on your hard drive. Each hard drive can have two types of partitions on them, either Primary partitions or Logical partitions. Because of how you will use these different partition types, I recommend that you keep your primary partitions only on the beginning of the first hard drive and that you make all the other partitions on your system logical partitions. You can have up to four primary partitions on each hard drive. If you have logical partitions on the same hard drive, then you can only have up to three primary partitions on that drive. Only one primary partition is active at a time on each hard drive and the others are hidden from use and cannot be accessed. The active primary partition on your first hard drive is given the drive letter c: Again, keep primary partitions on the first hard drive only.

You can have as many logical partitions on your hard drive as you physically have space for them. With our large hard drives today, you may have 3-4 logical partitions on each hard drive with each being less than 8GB in size. In certain cases, you may have a logical partition that is larger than 8GB in size. We will point this out later in our presentation. Logical partitions are normally not hidden and are almost always usable. This makes them ideal for storing your application programs and data files. All of the logical partitions on a hard drive must be located together inside the extended primary partition. The extended partition is really not a partition that can hold files like primary or logical partitions can. Instead, the extended partition is a holder of logical partitions on each hard drive. Logical partitions are inside the extended partition while primary partitions are outside the extended partition boundaries. Clean as mud? Now you’re all experts on your hard drive architecture. Let’s start assigning functions to each of our partitions.

We begin with our primary partitions. Primary partitions are intended for operating systems only, although other files are sometimes placed in the primary partitions. Our objective in organizing your hard drive is to move all of these other files out of the primary partition, leaving only the operating system in that partition. This will let the primary partition that contains only the operating system be quite small. You may be able to keep it under 1GB, but you can certainly keep it under 2GB in size. This small size will permit more than one operation systems in primary partitions to be located on the beginning of your first hard drive. Some operating systems must be within the first 8GBs of the beginning of your first hard drive. This lets us prepare for future needs in this area.

As we move files out of the primary (c:) partition, we can organize them a bit. The first logical partition I would set up would be one for all of your application programs. These are programs like Microsoft Office, Quicken, PhotoSuite, and other applications that you use to do things with your computer. The nice thing about keeping all of your applications in one partition is that this partition will not become fragmented very quickly. So, you may seldom have to defrag this rather large partition. The size of this partition depends on how many applications you have. I’d start out with just under 8GB for your application partition. You can reduce the size later if needed. To move your applications out of your c: partition takes a special application moving utility. If you try to use Windows Explorer to move the application folders, the folders will be moved, but the Registry in Windows will still point back to your c: drive as the location of the application. There are application movers in Norton’s CleanSweep, McAfee’s UnInstaller, and OnTrack’s EasyUninstaller 2000. You can also download COA2 from PC Magazine’s web site to do this.

Next, set up a logical partition to contain your data files. These are the most important files on your entire system. These are all of the files you created with your application programs. If you use Office, these are your documents, spreadsheets, and databases. If you use Quicken, these are your checkbook register. If you trace your genealogy, this is the database of all of your ancestors that you have worked years to collect. Your data partition size depends on the size of your data files. I’d start with 2-3GB and increase that later if you need to. These important data files must be protected by backing them up frequently. By placing them all in one partition, it makes the task of backing them up much easier and hence you will do it more frequently. We even have a special product to help you automatically backup these critical data files for you. We’ll take about that later. Another advantage of backing up your data files is to protect them from viruses. Viruses must attach to executable code in order to work. By removing your important data files from your applications and operating systems, you are moving them one step further away from potential viruses.

The last three suggestions in this area will help you to improve the performance of your hard drive. In reading or writing information to your hard drive, the single slowest operation is moving the read/write arm to the track on your hard drive that contains the data you are working with. By minimizing the distance that this read/write arm must move, you can improve the performance of your hard drive. The first recommendations is to keep all of your active partitions together near the front of your hard drive and to place any seldom used partitions at the end of the hard drive. In this example, you’ll see that the active APPS and DATA partitions are at opposite ends of the hard drive with a less used BKUP partition between them. When you run an application, you read it from your APPS partition and then to work on the data file for that application you read it from the DATA partition. The read/write arm must continually travel over the less used BKUP partition. Notice, by placing the APPS and DATA partitions near the beginning of the drive and putting the BKUP partition near the end of the drive, the distance the read/write head must travel is reduced, thus improving drive performance.

The next suggest to improve the performance of your hard drive is to keep your partition large enough to contain your files, but small enough so that you don’t have a large distance to move the read/write arm over an empty portion of the partition. In this example, we have the APPS and DATA partitions next to each other near the beginning of the hard drive, but we have make the partition size much larger that is needed. Thus we end up moving the read/write arm over a lot of empty space in the APPS partition in order to access the DATA partition. By reducing the size of these two partitions to have only about 30% empty space in them, we can reduce the distance the read/write head must move to go between the two partitions. Put the extra space in the seldom used BKUP partition at the end of the hard drive where it will not slow down the performance of your drive. We can always adjust their size later if we need some more room in the partitions.

The last suggestion is to use an optimizing defrag utility to organize the files within a partition. Windows ME offers such an optimizing defrag utility. Normally, when you run a defrag utility on a partition of your hard drive, the files within the partition are randomly sequenced from the beginning of the partition to the end. You may have an active “A” file near the beginning of the partition and an active “B” file near the end of the partition. If the partition is large with lots of files, like your APPS partition, then the time to move the read/write arm from file “A” to file “B” could be quite slow. When you defrag the partition using the optimizing option, all of the most active files are placed together near the beginning of the partition and all the less active are place near the end of the partition. Therefore, the read/write head will move more quickly between the active files without having to pass over many less active files. Be aware that most backup utilities will loose the optimization when the partition is restored and you’ll need to re-optimize the partition. PowerQuest’s Drive Image backup utility  preserves the optimization when restoring the partition.

Well, that completes our ten basic suggestions for organizing your hard drive. Remember, you can organize your single drive system with an operating system partition, an applications partition, and a data partition just as well as the two drive examples shown here. Having a second drive is still the best way to go, so get it first and then organize your hard drives. The next three suggestions have to do with Multiple Operating Systems. How many here run more than one operating system on your computer? I see a few hands, but not nearly enough. Some of the most exciting things you can do with your computer involves multiple operating systems. You’re missing some real advantages if you don’t consider the following three suggestions.

The first suggestion using multiple operating systems is the obvious one -- to try out some of the new operating systems available today like Linux, Windows 2000, or the BeOS. Some of these new operating systems offer some real advantages to us that we may want to try. However, you do not want to destroy your current Windows operating system just to try out one of the new ones. Using multiple operating systems, you can keep your current operating system and still try something new. Here’s how you do this. Once you have removed your applications and data files from your c: drive, you should have lots of empty room in it to take advantage of. Using PartitionMagic, you can reduce the size of your c: drive and set up another primary partition next to it. In this empty primary partition you will install the new operating system you want to try. There is a special paper on the PartitionMagic CD that leads you through the steps to do this. Switching between your current Windows system and the new operating systems is as easy as rebooting your system using PowerQuest’s BootMagic utility.

The next suggestion for using multiple operating systems is to help you safely migrate from one operating system to the next. How many here use win95 as their main operating system? A few hands. How many use Win98 as your operating system? That seems to be the most of us. What about the WinMe operating system? Again, only a few hands. Windows Me is the latest version of the Win95/98/Me family of operating systems and have the latest technology included in it. It is the version that many of us may want to move to in the future. Our concern is how to do this safely. Let me tell you how this can be done. First, you create a second empty primary partition on your first hard drive using PartitionMagic. We are going to install WinMe in this empty partition in two steps. The first step is to use PartitionMagic to copy your entire Win98 partition into the empty partition. Then, you will install WinMe on top of this copy. You still have your current Win98 system in the first primary partition and WinMe in the second primary partition. You can quickly switch between the two to test out your applications.

Where are your applications in this example? They are on the second hard drive in the application partition. How does Win98 know where they are? It uses the Registry and Shortcuts and other pointers in the c: partition to access these application programs on the e: drive. The first thing we need to do now that we have installed WinMe on the hard drive is to test out all of our applications to make sure they work properly under WinMe. How is WinMe going to know that our applications are located on drive e:? It knows where these applications are because we copied the Registry and Shortcuts and other pointers from Win98 when we copied the entire partition into the empty partition. WinMe takes advantage of these pointers when it was installed on top of the copy. Now we can use our applications in the e: drive from either Win98 or WinMe. We need to test out all of our applications to make sure they still work under WinMe. If they do not work under WinMe, we can always switch back to Win98 to run them until we can get the latest version that works under WinMe installed on our computer. When all of our applications work, then we can simply delete our Win98 partition and only use WinMe. This is a much safer way to migrate to WinMe.

Before we explorer this next suggestion, let me ask if any of you have ever had your Windows system freeze up on you? (Laughter) You mean this happens to you like it frequently happens to me? How about the Blue Screen of Death, have any of you seen this? (Again, Laughter) In this next example of using multiple operating systems, I’m going to show you how to eliminate or greatly reduce the number of times Windows freezes up on us or crashes on us. There are some utilities on the market that claim to be able to cleanup our Windows systems. Frankly, I’m not sure I trust them that much. They may clean off some files that I did not want cleaned off my system. Let me show you a safer way to clean up your Windows system. First, you will use PartitionMagic to create an empty primary partition on your first hard drive. In this empty partition, we are going to install the very latest version of your operating system directly from the CD to give us a fresh, clean copy of the operating system. This time we are not going to copy across all of the garbage from our old Windows system.

The question I always get at this point is how can I install directly from my upgrade CD into an empty partition without having a prior release of the operating system installed in the partition. Can you do this? Yes you can and I’m going to tell you how to do this. You start to install into the empty partition from your upgrade CD. At some point in the installation, Windows will pause with a message that says: “This is an upgrade version and I can’t find the prior qualifying release in your partition. Can you point me to it?” All you need to do is to remove the WinMe CD from the reader and place the CD from your prior version of Windows in the reader and answer with the address of your CD reader. WinMe will then look at the CD and determine that it is a prior release and it will then let you go on with the installation. This lets you install directly from the CD and keeps your new system clean of the clutter of an earlier release. When you complete the installation, you will have one of the cleanest versions of your operating system installed and running.

The only problem is that your old applications installed under your old windows system will not be found in your new clean system. Why is this? That’s right, the Clean system’s Registry is empty and does not have the pointers to the applications. Frankly, this is probably a good situation for us as it forces us to cleanly install our applications on this new clean operating system. Use PartitionMagic to setup an empty Logical partition on your second hard drive. Now, don’t install all of your applications in the new partition, but only those applications that you use daily or at least several times each week. It’s the old 80/20 rule here. 80% of your time you will run only 20% of your application programs. So, install just these very important 20% of your applications under the new system. This keeps the clutter down in this clean system. Once you’ve done this, you will use your clean system most of the time. This system will not freeze up on you or crash on you. It will run smoothly and very efficiently. When you do have to run a seldom used program, you simply reboot and switch back to your old system for a short time, then back to your clean system for most of your work.

When you want to try out a new application, where do you install it? On you Old System or on your Clean System? Install it first on your Old System. Try it out there. See if it works and if you like the software. If you end up using the application very often, then also install it on your clean system. If you only use it infrequently, leave it on your old system and use it there when you need it. Businesses have different terms for these two systems. They call the Old System their Test System and the Clean System they call their Production System. You too can set up a Test System and a Production System on your hard drive using the standard architecture of multiple operating systems. It works like a charm!

The product that helps you to organize your hard drive and to run multiple operating systems is PartitionMagic. PowerQuest introduced this amazing product six years ago and today we have version 6 of this product. PartitionMagic lists for $69.95, but with a rebate coupon, you will pay about $55 for this excellent product. We offer it to user group members for only $30 and I have copies with me today to purchase after the presentation, if any of you are interested. How many in this group have ever used PartitionMagic? I see that several of you have used this product. PartitionMagic v6  offers you many new features that were not in prior releases. Let’s take a look at some of these new features.

This release fully support both Windows 2000 and Windows Me. There is a new explorer-like interface that shows all of your hard drives on the screen at once. This lets you quickly drag partitions from one drive to the other to copy or move partitions. With v5 we added a Merge partition function. This is the other side of this feature. We can now split a partition into two partitions. If you accidentally or purposely delete a partition and later regret doing this, you can undelete the entire partition and all of its contents will again be available to you. PartitionMagic is a very powerful tool in the right hands. However, you would not want your nephew to get his hands on this tool. He could cause some serious problems if he did. So, PartitionMagic can now be password protected so that only you can use it on your system.

Before we go on with our discussion on Protecting your hard drive, let’s take a minute to see PartitionMagic v6 in action. (Minimize the presentation at this point while you give a short demonstration of PartitionMagic v6. Choose functions in PartitionMagic that will not cause you to boot out to DOS or reboot your computer. When you are done with the demonstration, return to this point to complete the presentation.)

That completes our discussion on how to organize your hard drive and how to take advantage of multiple operating systems. I hope that each of you have picked up a few ideas that you’d like to try out on your computer system. As we have demonstrated to you, PartitionMagic v6 is the ideal utility to make these ideas happen on your hard drive. Next, we need to warn you about protecting your newly organized hard drive. Hard drives are mechanical devices, then spin all the time your computer is turned on. As such, they wear out over time. The life of a hard drive is only 2-3 years. If you are real lucky, your hard drive may last you 4 years or even 5 years. If you are not so lucky, your drive could crash in 6 months. How many here have had their hard drive crash on them? I see a lot of hands. Those that did not raise your hands, don’t worry, your turn is coming. (laughter) It’s not if your hard drive will fail on you, it’s when is it going to fail. We all must face a hard drive failure in our future. The only way we can protect against a hard drive failure is to have a current backup of all of the files on our hard drive that we can place on a new drive when our old drive fails. Let’s look at three suggestions to better protect our hard drive files.

First, if you’ve followed my suggestions up to this point, you now have a large second hard drive installed on your computer. Invest a portion of this second hard drive in protecting your files. You know that the best media today to backup our large hard drives is not tape or cartridge systems, but is a second large hard drive. Hard drives are much faster than tape or cartridges, they cost much less than buying many cartridges, and they can be automatically setup to backup with little intervention. Using a hard drive to backup another is so easy that you will tend to do it more frequently than using other methods of backup. So, you notice that on my example I’m showing a backup partition that I’ve setup on each hard drive. This is a large partition (maybe 20 GB), but since only a few large backup images will be stored on it, you will not waste much space and you can save your backup files a bit faster with large cluster sizes. There are two types of backup operations that we need to do using these backup partitions. Let’s look at both of them.

First, we need to backup our entire hard drive on a regular basis. For most users, doing this once a month should be adequate.If you frequently change your software and settings, then you need to backup your entire system more frequently. If you seldom change these things, then you could put off backing up your entire system to once every 2-3 months. It’s better to backup more frequently than to put it off for many months. A drive failure will certainly catch you off guard if you haven’t backed up your entire system for many months. I recommend you use Drive Image to backup all of your partitions by creating a condensed image of each partition and storing this image on the other hard drive’s backup partition. Each partition image file contains not only the partition information, but all of the files, settings, and hidden files contained within that partition. Using this cross backup approach, if one of your hard drives should fail on you, you simply remove the failing drive and place a new drive in its place. Then you use Drive Image to restore all of the partitions and their content from the backup images on the other hard drive.

If only one drive fails, you can be back in business, using your computer, in a matter of minutes instead of spending days rebuilding your system from scratch. Now, what if both drives fail on you at the same time. It could happen. Let’s say your office was damaged by fire and your computer was destroyed. You’ve lost not only your hard drive, but the backup images you had stored on the other hard drives. The solution to this is to save your condensed backup images on some sort of removable media that can inexpensively be stored away from your computer. I’d recommend that you use a CD-R/RW to do this. The blank CDs are very inexpensive to create. It will still take you a while to make these image CDs, but you only need to do this each quarter since the risk of loosing both hard drives is relatively low. Drive Image comes with an Image File Editor that will help you break your images into segments that will fit on one or more blank CDs. Using a backup plan such as this, your entire hard drive will be protected against a total system failure.

Your data files cannot be adequately protected using the full system backup approach we just discussed. These files change much too frequently to be backed up monthly or quarterly. Data files need to be backed up at least daily if not more frequently. Included with our Drive Image product is a utility called DataKeeper that is designed to backup your important data files. One of the best features of DataKeeper is that you can set it to monitor your important data files on your hard drive. If you have collected all of your data files into one data partition, then you can simply ask DataKeeper to watch over your entire data partition. As soon as any file changes in the data partition, a condensed backup copy of that file will be automatically saved to your other hard drive’s backup partition. Using this approach, you will always have a current backup of all of your important data files without having to remember to do this important task. To further protect your important data files, you should create a CD of the data backup folder each month and store it away from your computer.

Drive Image was introduced by PowerQuest about four years ago. Today, we have Drive Image v4 which also includes DataKeeper v4 in the same package. Combined, this makes this product one of the most powerful backup systems available on the market. Drive Image lists at $69.95, but with a rebate sticker you will pay about $55 for this excellent backup utility. We offer Drive Image v4 to user group members for only $30. I have copies of this product with me today that you can purchase after the meeting if you are interested. Have any of you used Drive Image or DataKeeper before. I’m glad to see that some of you have discovered this great product. In the past year, PowerQuest has enhanced this product twice to keep up with required new features. Drive Image v4 now offers many new features. Let’s look at some of the new features that this product offers you.

Drive Image v4 supports the new Windows Me operating system. Now you can write directly to internal CD-R/RW drives. This feature was at the top of our want list for many months. You can store your condensed image files on hidden partitions to better protect them from accidental loss. The Image Size Estimator will tell you in advance how many blank CDs you’ll need to save a partition image. The Image Integrity Checker is perhaps the most important feature on this list. With it, you can create your image file and then thoroughly test that image file to make sure it is valid and working. There is nothing worst than creating a backup, only to find out later when you need it that it was no good. And, the DataKeeper utility has been enhanced and packaged with Drive Image so that you have a full backup solution in one box.

That concludes the main part of our presentation. As I promised you earlier, here is an example of how you can setup a single hard drive system using PartitionMagic and Drive Image. With only one hard drive on your system, you need to backup your system to a CD-R/RW on a more frequent basis, but all of the partitions we covered are included in this example. Please seriously consider adding a second hard drive as it will give you more options to work with.

Drive Image is a very powerful backup utility, but one that is very easy to use. To show you how easy it is to use Drive Image and DataKeeper, let’s take a couple of minutes to quickly demonstrate this product. (A quick demonstration of Drive Image and DataKeeper will help your audience to see the value and ease of using a good backup utility. You can end your presentation with the Drive Image and DataKeeper demonstrations and will not need to return to this slide presentation.)

That concludes our presentation for today. I hope you have learned some things about your hard drive and have some projects in mind to better the use of your own hard drive. Remember, PowerQuest offers you the best hard drive utilities available today. Not only that, they offer them to you at a greatly reduced price so that you can try them out. We know that once you use them, you’ll recommend them to others and that helps us spread the word on these excellent products. Thank you for your attention. You’ve been an excellent audience!