So, the answer should probably be presented in tiers for the size of the application, but I'm wondering about people's experience with choosing where the disk drives used by the database should reside. Here are some of the options: JBOD - (just a bunch of disks) Old fashioned internal disks - fast but not very expandable NAS - Slow bu...
I am developing an application to install a large number of data files from multiple DVDs. The application will prompt the user to insert the next disk, however Windows will automatically try to open that disk either in an explorer window or ask the user what to do with the new disk. How can I intercept and cancel auto play messages fr...
When administering Linux systems I often find myself struggling to track down the culprit after a partition goes full. I normally use du / | sort -nr but on a large filesystem this takes a long time before any results are returned. Also, this is usually successful in highlighting the worst offender but I've often found myself resorti...
Is is possible to read a disk directly with .Net? By directly I mean via the device bypassing the file system. I think I would go about this by opening the device some way "\Device\Ide\IdeDeviceP2T0L0-1" for example. If I can't open the device with a .NET api knowing which Win32 API to use would be helpful. ...
In this question someone asked for ways to display disk usage in Linux. I'd like to take this one step further down the cli-path... how about a shell script that takes the output from something like a reasonable answer to the previous question and generates a graph/chart from it (output in a png file or something)? This may be a bit too ...
Erasing programs such as Eraser recommend overwriting data maybe 36 times. As I understand it all data is stored on a hard drive as 1s or 0s. If an overwrite of random 1s and 0s is carried out once over the whole file then why isn't that enough to remove all traces of the original file? ...
Does anyone know how to flush the disk write cache data from the cache manager for the current directory (or any given file or directory, for that matter), from a Windows command line? ...
I mean really erase. In a secure way. (It's Ubuntu) UPDATE: Ok, "shred -vfz -n 10 /dev/hda" looks like what I was after. ...
I have several old 3.5in floppy disks that I would like to backup. My attempts to create an image of the disks have failed. I tried using the UNIX utility dd_rescue, but when the kernel tries to open (/dev/fd0) I get a kernel error "floppy0: probe failed...". I would like an image because some of the floppies are using the LIF file sy...
Some time ago (the last time I had to care about this was a few years back), booting a PC worked kind of like this: There was an ORDER to disks (primary Master, primary slave, secondary master & slave) The PC would take them in order, and look for an "active partition" (which was set with FDISK) It'd boot from the first active partitio...
If I am trying to determine the read speed of a drive, I can code a routine to write files to a filesystem and then read those files back. Unfortunately, this doesn't give an accurate read speed because Windows does disk read caching. Is there a way to flush the disk read cache of a drive in C# / .Net (or perhaps with Win32 API calls) ...
When the policy for a disk in Windows XP and Vista is set to enable write caching on the hard disk, is there a way to flush a file that has just been written, and ensure that it has been committed to disk? I want to do this programmatically in C++. Closing the file does perform a flush at the application level, but not at the operating...
Is it possible to read damaged media (cd, hdd, dvd,...) even if windows explorer bombs out? What I mean to ask is, whether there is a set of APIs or something that can access the disk at a very low level (below explorer?) and read whatever can be retrieved even if it is only partial, especially if you can still see the file is there fro...
Accessing a raw disk partition in Windows Vista requires kernel mode control, as opposed to for instance WinXP where you can access it from user mode. However, I've heard that when it comes to USB flash memory, a partition can still be accessed from user mode even on Windows Vista. Is this true? Regards /Robert ...
On a particular Debian server, iostat (and similar) report an unexpectedly high volume (in bytes) of disk writes going on. I am having trouble working out which process is doing these writes. Two interesting points: Tried turning off system services one at a time to no avail. Disk activity remains fairly constant and unexpectedly hi...
Does anyone know a way to find out programatically which physical disk holds a given partition? Manually, I can find this info using Start->Run->diskmgmt.msc , where I can see that (on my computer) that partitions C: and D: are on disk 1, E: & F: on disk 0. This is for optimizing some file crunching operations by doing them in parallel ...
I'd like to use WMI on some windows systems to poll the network usage of each process. From what I can tell, there are many IO instances in the Win32_PerfRawData_PerfProc_Process but they are for the combined IO of network,disk,and device. Is there a way to break that up so I can get network and disk IO separate? ...
If I start copying a huge file tree from one position to another or if some other process starts doing lots of disk activity, the foreground app (GUI) slows way down. For example, take a 2gb file tree with 100k files in it. Open a console and do cp -r bigtree bigtree2. Then go to firefox and start browsing. Firefox is almost unusable. Ev...
I'm using Delphi 2007. I am copying files to a remote drive. When the copying ends, I shutdown/standby the machine. It can happen that some files don't get copied from buffer to disk, and the remote disk gets disconnected, so the backup is not completed. I need to detect disk activity on that disk to properly be able to take the close a...
So due to a recent act of stupidity and bravado, I uttered the words "backups! who needs backups?!" and what followed was the tragic loss of 260gb of data. This scenario in particular is requiring me to recover a repartitioned hard disk, but I was wondering what tools people here use in general to recover lost data. I'm sure everyone h...