Hard Drives

Norton Ghost:

This is a great utility that is able to take an image of your hard drive, or partition. If any thing goes wrong on your computer you can restore it back to the same state as when you took the Norton Ghost image.This restores the computer far quicker than doing a format and reinstalling Windows.

Partition Magic:

This is a very clever tool which will allow you to resize your hard drive, without having to format or reinstall windows, for example you could alter one drive (C:) if it was quite large from say 40 gigabytes into 3 drives, over 12 gigabytes in size.

Fdisk:

The program that comes with windows, used at the command prompt, very large hard drives may need a newer version, a very useful tool though care must be taken, and the drive needs to be formated.

Scandisk:

Scandisk comes with windows and is able to fix many types of errors, and can be accessed at the command prompt, and in windows itself.

Defragmenter:

The hard drive becomes defragmented in time and the defragment utility with windows should be run on a regular basis, as should scandisk.