Installing Ubuntu 11.04 or any other distribution on an external hard drive connected to a computer via USB is about the same as installing it on an internal hard disk. The key is to remember, after partitioning the disk, to install GRUB, the boot loader, in the MBR of the external disk, rather than in the MBR of the internal disk.

Mary, the daughter of a friend is in college: her Windows XP laptop constantly reboots and, we suspect, has a bad hard drive. The system will boot a live CD (Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Desktop), and data on the hard drive can be read. During boot, the live CD identifies disk errors and tries unsuccessfully to repair them.

A file archiver is computer software which brings together a group of files into a single archive file. An archive file is therefore a collection of files and directories that are stored in one file. There are many advantages of storing multiple files this way. For example, an archive is a great way to store backup data, transfer files to another directory, or to a different computer.

Everytime after you have reformatted the hard disk and reinstalled the Linux distro of your choice, the one troublesome thing that you need to do is to re-download all your applications and restore all the settings. This is made worst when your wireless connection just don’t work with the newly installed distro.

FlyBack is a tool similar to Apple's TimeMachine. It is intended to create snapshot-backups of selected directories or even your full hard drive. From the FlyBack project page: "FlyBack is a snapshot-based backup tool based on rsync. It creates successive backup directories mirroring the files you wish to backup, but hard-links unchanged files to the previous backup. This prevents wasting disk space while providing you with full access to all your files without any sort of recovery program. If your machine crashes, just move your external drive to your new machine and copy the latest backup using whatever file browser you normally use." This article shows how to install and use FlyBack on Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon).

Clonezilla is a partition or disk clone tool similar to Norton Ghost. It saves and restores only used blocks in hard drive.. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live : It is suitable for single machine backup and restore.

We’ve all made mistakes during our configuration and at some point wish we could go back in time before the mistake. Now that you have the ultimate setup that you’ve worked so hard on, how are you going to be sure you have the same setup after a system or hard drive crash?

Nowadays hard drive manufactures are switching to a new hard drive technology which uses 4KB sectors size instead of conventional 512B. This new technology requires little tweaks to get a better performance in comparison to out-of-the-box settings. This article will describe some simple to follow instruction on how to partition the WD EARS hard-drive to get better overall performance.

Many people leave their computers on around the clock. This usually implies that all the attached hard disks are always spinning. Constantly spinning up a hard disk normally increases the chances of drive failure. When a disk is not powered it should last longer than if it was spinning.