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At the October DACS general meeting, Gene Barlow covered all the aspects of managing hard drives. He made a dry subject interesting enough to sustain the attention of the members that gathered at the Radisson Hotel. Gene and his wife Linda travel, visiting user groups throughout the entire U.S. They talk mostly about PowerQuest's PartitionMagic and DriveImage, as well as AccessData's SecureClean and WipeDrive.

Gene started his presentation by explaining the progression of the Windows operating system from Windows 95 to Windows XP. According to Gene, there are little differences between Windows XP for home users and Windows XP Professional for business users. Gene granted that the operating system has much improved over the years and is at its top with the latest version of XP.

He explained how best to migrate from an earlier version of Windows to XP. Using Partition Magic, users can choose whether to do a clean install or an upgrade install. A clean install is to start with a formatted drive or, even better, a new computer. An upgrade will install on top of the present operating system. An upgrade could go smoothly and a computer can function perfectly under the new system. However, it could also go very wrong and nothing on the computer work properly. A complete back-up is therefore a must, before attempting any upgrade. An alternate solution is to keep the present system and install the newer version onto another drive. Gene explained how to create a second primary drive, using Partition Magic to make a clean install. This is where Partition Magic by Power Quest comes in very handy. It creates, deletes and organizes partitions at will. By having the new system and the old system side by side, the transition to the new operating system is smoothed out. The first step is to make two copies of the original operating system, then upgrade to XP by creating a second primary with Partition Magic. He also demonstrated how to switch from an older version of Windows to XP by using Partition Magic's BootMagic.

Gene stated that the usual life time of a hard disk is two to three years. He described the different types of media available for hard drive backups, with their respective disadvantages. The Internet, tape drives, CD drives and Network drives are all slow processes. The cartdrige can be an expensive media to use. Another hard drive is the best solution to backing up a hard drive. Drive Image 2002 comes into the picture, using cross back-ups by using each drive to back up each other in a condensed format. Those image back-ups can be copied to a CD on a regular basis. Barlow recommends doing a full hard-disk back-up once a month, with important data backed-up as often as they are important to the user. Data Keeper can be used to back-up data on a regular basis. Gene demonstrated a back-up on his computer using Drive Image.

Also mentioned briefly were two other products by Access Data, which specializes in police-type software that breaks encryption for law enforcement. WipeDrive makes an exact number of "passes" on a hard drive to completely eliminate data. Gene pointed out that just reformatting a drive will not necessarily remove critical data. A drive needs to be totally erased. Gene said that WipeDrive is called "The Bulldozer." Also mentioned was Secure Clean, which deletes specific data that a user wants to remove from a drive, not a complete delete of a drive.

Gene Barlow also talked briefly about the educational CD he authored on the subject of maintaining, organizing and understanding your hard disk. His presentation was a rather interesting discussion and chock-full of useful details. More details can be found on Gene's web site at http://www.ugr.com/products.html.