This weekend I upgraded my 250GB hard drive to a 500GB hard drive in my main computer. I’ve done this countless times with little effort but this experience was anything but pleasant.

Just received this in my email; another victim of the current financial market, support.

For products purchased on or after January 3, 2009, the limited warranty period for consumer electronics, notebook and personal storage bare drives sold to Seagate Authorized Distributors will be changed from 5 to 3 years. Seagate believes that the new warranty period and terms better reflect current industry standards.
Seagate enterprise drives and Seagate and Maxtor external retail products that have 5-year warranty periods will not be affected by this change.

There are two basic types of external hard drives for sale: those that use 3.5″ hard drives and those that use 2.5″ hard drives.  The 3.5″ units typically have an external power supply, multiple connection types (USB, eSATA, Firewire) and have some sort of stand to keep them in position.  The 2.5″ units have no external power connections and normally connect via USB.
The important item here is that the 3.5″ units are designed to remain stationary while the 2.5″ units are designed to be mobile.  It’s this alone that should …

I was browsing last week when I came across Partition Find and Mount from Atola Technology: it’s a utility to mount a lost partition as a drive.  Nice for botched formats, failed boot sectors and the like.  This led me to their main site and a bunch of other extremely useful hard drive and file recovery programs.
Atola Technology