Executive Summary:
Our latest collection of great free/open-source tools includes CamStudio, CDBurnerXP, Comodo Firewall Pro, DriveImage XML, GParted LiveCD, JkDefrag, PageDefrag, and TestDisk.
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I’m addicted to digging up quality tools and utilities that are free—it’s a treasurehunter’s
challenge! Sure, anyone can find costly utilities that do a good job of making
a certain task easier. The trick is to find the free ones that perform just as well as their
commercial counterparts. Since last September’s publication
of “8 More Absolutely Cool, Totally Free Utilities” (InstantDoc
ID 96628), I’ve been having a lot of fun unearthing more and
more free utilities for my toolbox, and I’m dying to share them with
you. So, check these out and start downloading! (Check out the Learning
Path, page 54, for download details.)
TestDisk
Recently, an external USB drive that I was using for file backups and
storage of non-critical files experienced a hard crash—you know,
the “thunk-thunk-thunk” heads-against-platters noise that makes
any systems administrator’s skin crawl. I knew my chances for a
full recovery were rather slim, so I started looking around for datarecovery
utilities.
I came across TestDisk, an open-source application licensed
under the GNU Public License. Available from Christophe Grenier,
TestDisk—completely free for any person or organization to use—
can help you recover damaged partitions, make non-bootable disks
bootable again, and repair damaged boot sectors. The application
runs under DOS, Windows, Linux, the BSD variants, and MacOS, to
name just a few OSs. File-system support includes every common
type (e.g., FAT, NTFS, EXT2/3), as well as a bunch you’ve probably
never heard of. I have no doubt that TestDisk can repair or recover data from a broad range of malfunctioning
systems. Figure 1 shows its main interface.
Unfortunately, however, TestDisk didn’t
solve my problem. The “thunk-thunk-thunk”
sound was a dead giveaway that I was facing
a physical/mechanical disk problem. No
software can fix physical problems, and the
TestDisk documentation makes that clear.
For mechanical problems, you’d need to
enlist the services of a professional datarecovery
service that can physically open the
drive and try to read the platters back.
I had hoped I’d get lucky, to no avail. Still,
the experience gained me another valuable
tool for my toolbox—one that I’ll keep around
should disaster strike.
GParted LiveCD
Have you ever painted yourself into a corner
by partitioning a physical disk drive into multiple
logical partitions, only to realize months
later that you didn’t anticipate your space
needs correctly? In the past, I’ve paid for
commercial partition-management utilities
such as Norton’s PartitionMagic to get myself
out of such situations. Invariably, however, by
the time I need to use a partition-management
utility a second time, I’m using a newer
file system or a new type of disk that my
partition manager doesn’t support. Recently,
for example, I had to move an ext3 partition
around on one of my systems’ hard disks, but
my outdated partition-management utility
didn’t support ext3.
Having paid multiple times for similar feature
sets, I was recently happy to find GParted
LiveCD when I needed to resize some partitions
on my laptop. GParted LiveCD is a
bootable runtime version of the Gnome Partition
Editor (GParted). By booting up a small,
stripped-down instance of Linux, GParted
LiveCD is the only tool you’ll ever need for
managing partitions on your systems—including
resizing partitions, moving partitions,
and even mirroring partitions.
GParted LiveCD is available as a downloadable
ISO image. After the download, you
can burn it straight to a bootable CD-ROM
(see CDBurnerXP 4 later) and put it in the
machine whose partitions need editing. Of
course, it goes without
saying that you should
always perform a full
system backup before
resizing a partition on a
production system.
JkDefrag
How about my absolute
favorite disk-based utility?
JkDefrag is a diskdefragmentation
and
-optimization utility for
all modern versions of
Windows. You might ask,
“Why should I care about a disk defragmenter
when Windows has one built in?”
Because the Windows defragmenter is a bit
basic, there’s still a great marketplace for
commercial third-party disk-defragmentation
utilities, and for that reason, I appreciate
a utility such as JkDefrag.
Developed by Jeroen Kessels, JkDefrag
runs automatically, is very easy to use, and
supports several customization features
through command-line switches. Speaking
of command-line switches, there are also
GUI and screen-saver versions of JkDefrag,
in addition to the command-line version.
JkDefrag can handle typical internal
hard disks, external USB drives, floppy disks,
memory sticks—essentially anything that
Windows interprets as a drive. It uses the
standard defragmentation API provided by
Microsoft, so it’s as safe to use as Windows’
built-in defragmenting utility. However, JkDefrag
doesn’t simply aim to defragment your
hard disk; the tool’s available command-line
strategies will also help you optimize that
disk’s performance. Figure 2 shows JkDefrag
at work.
For example, when you launch JkDefrag
for the first time (without any command-line
parameters), it will begin to defragment and
optimize all the mounted writable drives
on your system that it can find. The default
optimization is a fast optimization, which
should increase system performance a bit. For example, the beginning or center of a
hard disk performs much better than the very
edge of a disk; therefore, as a default strategy,
JkDefrag will attempt to move all files to the
center of the disk. However, it doesn’t do so
arbitrarily! JkDefrag tries to place files closest
to the center of the disk based on three
levels of importance: directories (the most
often accessed files on a system) in the front,
regular files in the middle, and SpaceHogs at the end. JkDefrag uses the SpaceHogs
nomenclature to describe files that tend to
be large but less important. Examples of
SpaceHogs include MP3, WMV, and AVI files,
and any i386 directories you might have lying
around. When I run JkDefrag on my systems,
I also flag AAC and *.m4? files as SpaceHogs
by using the -u command-line option. (I have
a lot of purchased content from iTunes.)
After JkDefrag finishes its first default run,
you should have a neatly organized hard disk,
with your most important data toward the
center of the disk and the least important in the back. Once you’ve finished your first run,
you can schedule recurring defrags to take
place during off hours through the Control
Panel Schedule Tasks applet.
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