Apple has just introduced a small app “Lion Recovery Disk Assistant” for Mac OS X Lion users that lets you create Lion Recovery on an external drive. Although, OS X Lion has ‘Lion Recovery’ integrated by default but the Recovery HD partition exists on the boot disk, thus making it pretty difficult to repair or reinstall Lion in case the hard drive fails. (Assuming you don’t have a Installation DVD of Lion or a Bootable flash drive).

The Lion Recovery Disk Assistant lets you create Lion Recovery on an external drive that has all of the same capabilities as the built-in Lion Recovery: reinstall Lion, repair the disk using Disk Utility, restore from a Time Machine backup, or browse the web with Safari. This drive can be used in the event you cannot start your computer with the built-in Recovery HD, or you have replaced the hard drive with a new one that does not have Mac OS X installed.

Requirements:

• A Mac running OS X Lion with an existing Recovery HD
• An external USB hard drive or thumb drive with at least 1GB of free space

Note: The Lion Recovery Disk Assistant will erase all data on the external drive when creating the Recovery HD. You should either backup your data before running the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, or create a new partition on the external drive.

To create Lion Recovery on an external drive, download Lion Recovery Disk Assistant application on your Mac. Insert a USB flash drive or external hard drive, launch the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, select the drive where you would like to install, and follow the on screen instructions. Check the below screenshots:

>> The new partition will not be visible in the Finder or Disk Utility. To access Lion Recovery, reboot your Mac while holding the Option key. Select Recovery HD from the Start-up Manager. The external Recovery drive is represented by a orange color icon.

Notes:

• If the computer shipped with Lion, the external recovery drive can only be used with the system that created it.

• If the system was upgraded from Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard to Lion, the external recovery drive can be used with other systems that were upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion.

Source: Apple

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OS X Lion 10.7 comes with a completely new interface and introduces over 250 new features to offer an amazing experience on a Mac. One great and handy new feature integrated to Lion is ‘Lion Recovery’. Upon installing OS X Lion, it automatically creates a 650 MB sized recovery partition called “Recovery HD”, a new feature that lets you repair disks or reinstall OS X Lion without the need for a physical installation disc.

Lion Recovery is a built in feature on Lion, so you can easily restore system software to your Mac anytime in just a few clicks, without having to bother for install discs or drives. With Recovery HD, you can run Disk Utility to check or repair your hard drive, erase your hard drive and reinstall a fresh copy of Lion, or restore your Mac from a Time Machine backup. One can even use Safari to get help from Apple Support online.

To use Lion Recovery – Hold down Command-R during startup to boot into the Recovery HD, or hold down the Option key during startup and select Recovery HD.

Internet Recovery

If your Mac problem is a little less common — your hard drive has failed or you’ve installed a hard drive without OS X, for example — Internet Recovery takes over automatically. It downloads and starts Lion Recovery directly from Apple servers over a broadband Internet connection. And your Mac has access to the same Lion Recovery features online. Internet Recovery is built into every newly-released Mac starting with the Mac mini and MacBook Air.

via [iClarified]

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We’ve earlier shared tools to remove fake antivirus and now Symantec has lately noticed similar activity overspread by fake hard disk scanners and defragmentation tools. These  disk cleanup programs seems real but are actually fake, may cause damage to your system, and urge users to purchase a useless copy of their utility which is actually Fake.

List of Fake Disk Cleanup Utilities by Symantec:

• Ultra Defragger
• Smart Defragmenter
• HDD Defragmenter
• System Defragmenter
• Disk Defragmenter
• Quick Defragmenter
• Check Disk
• Scan Disk

They catch users attention by showing a list of errors and warnings, prompts to run the defragmentation process, which then boots into a black “safe mode” (which is fake) and proceeds to “fix” some of the issues. Lastly, users are presented with pop-ups saying ‘Fix serious issues’ which on proceeding asks to buy a license copy.

Do let us know if you’ve ever caught hold of any similar fake programs.

via [Symantec & JKwebtalks]

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Acronis has developed a free and useful tool which notifies users about their hard drive condition and helps them prevent the loss of most important and invaluable data stored on their HDD, which can occur in case the Hard disk fails.

Acronis Drive Monitor is a Free Hard Drive Monitoring Tool which monitors and determines the health of your hard disk drives installed on server, workstation and PCs. It is always advisable to check the health status of your Hard disk regularly because sometimes Hard drives fail after 2-3 yrs or before without giving any notification.

Key Benefits:

• Automatically checks for disk problems – Monitors state and health of physical drives via S.M.A.R.T. parameters (including temperature, seek error rate, spin-up time and more than 20 other indicators) and displays the status
• Monitors critical events that indicate a risk to data safety – Unless noticed early, these problems may become more severe and lead to partial or complete data loss
• Automatically receive warning alerts – Get immediate notification of early warnings of drive malfunctions in order that preventive actions can be taken
• State of disk backups – Be alerted if your latest backup has failed or if you haven’t created a backup for a while.
• Weekly status Reports – Stay current about electromechanical health of all drives with weekly reports.

Download Here  (17.4 MB)      via [TroubleFixers]

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MiniTool Drive Copy is a free Disk Copy software and Disk Cloning tool which allows users to easily copy and clone FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, VFAT, NTFS and NTFS5 partitions.

Whatever the disk is IDE, SATA, SCSI or removable drive. It can copy disk easily and quickly. After quick backup of disk or partitions, your data will keep safe even in the case of system crash. One can also boot the computer directly from the new disk.

Compatible with – Windows 2000 Professional/XP/Vista/Window 7

Download MiniTool Drive Copy  (4.96 MB)   [Homepage]Related Posts:

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• DriveImage XML – Image and Backup logical Drives & Partitions

Disk Space Fan is a nice disk space analysis tool for Windows. It helps you to free up disk space by quickly finding and deleting big, useless files. It displays disk space usage with a nice chart. You can also chose to scan a custom folder.

You can navigate the folders easily with the chart. It is also integrated with Windows Explorer to open, delete and browse files or folders. Just hover your mouse over the colors in chart to see the big sized items.

Supports: Windows XP with Service Pack 3, Vista, Windows 7

Download Disk Space FanRelated Posts:

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• Create password protected invisible disk – Secret Disk

Certainly, there are lot of software that can encrypt/decrypt secret files on your PC. But it is a time consuming task if you have to lock many files/folders. So, I’ve found a nice program which performs this task differently and easily too.

Secret Disk lets you create a separate disk on your PC which can be locked and unlocked with a password within one second! Moreover, when locked the disk is invisible in the Windows system.

To use it, just install Secret Disk and choose a password. Then, start Secret Disk, Press unlock button, enter your password. Now you will see one more disk X: in My Computer. You can now store your private files to secret disk X.

To lock secret disk, click its icon in system tray area and it will disappear with all contents. When you want your files back, open Secret Disk tool, press Unlock button and enter your password. It also has some handy customization options.

Download Secret Disk  [Free]

Also See: Hide/unhide your drives/partitions from My Computer

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SecretDrive is a free, small, efficient and reliable program to create up to 8 encrypted virtual disks. Virtual disk is protected by one of five modern encryption algorithms:

• AES (Rijndael)
• GOST 28174-89
• Blowfish
• Twofish
• CAST 256

Virtual disk looks like usual hard disk, so you can format it, defragment, check, backup and do other operations. It can be located in a file or in the RAM.

Key features

• 32/64 bit architecture support (64 bit version not Free)
• Strong "on the fly" data encryption by one of five modern encryption algorithms
• Simultaneous work up to 16 virtual disks
• RAM disk support
• Optional creation up to 4 hidden disks in an existing one
• Backup and restore secret disk header
• Encryption/decryption of files
• Simple and intuitive user interface
• Containers are protected from accidental deletion
• Built-in wipe manager
• Built-in text encrypter
• Built-in passwords generator

Supported OS: Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, Windows 7.

Download SecretDrive 32 bit version Free

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