TCS - Disk Investigator

Disk Investigator

by Don Singleton
Tulsa Computer Society
From the February 2003 issue of the I/O Port Newsletter

This article is based on one by Robert A Lewis, member of The Dayton Microcomputer Association, Inc. Dayton, OH, provided to us by the APCUG Editorial Committee. Robert's article did not seem to be clear, so I decided to review the same two programs he brought to our attention.

Disk Investigator is freeware. Download at http://www.theabsolute.net/sware/dskinv.html

Disk Investigator helps you to discover all that is hidden on your computer hard disk. It can also help you to recover lost data. Display the true drive contents by bypassing the operating system and directly reading the raw drive sectors. View and search raw directories, files, clusters, and system sectors. Verify the effectiveness of file and disk wiping programs. Undelete previously deleted files.

Here is an example of the display from Disk Investigator. Normal files, like don.txt, are shown in black. Folders, like Christian, holidays, inspirational, etc are shown in green. Deleted files are shown in red. In this folder there have been two different files called pay it forward.txt. Deleted directories are shown in magenta; in this folder there were two folders named "New Folder" which were created and then deleted.

You can view any file, and see it in both character mode and in hex. Here we are viewing the file for this article:

A related program, Clean Disk Security, is shareware ($25 registration fee), and can be downloaded from http://www.theabsolute.net/sware/clndisk.html

Clean Disk Security provides comprehensive disk cleaning for the very tightest security (for Win95, Win98, WinME, WinNT, Win2000, WinXP). This program gives you secure file deletion, making sure that deleted files cannot be undeleted again. Deleting a file normally just removes the file's directory entry, but the data itself remains on the disk. This program completely eliminates the contents of deleted files. The highly acclaimed Gutmann disk cleaning method is now available as an option. This program can also clean the Window's swap file, and can optionally clean unneeded temporary files from your hard disk, such as your Internet browser cache, files in your system's Recycle Bin, and can clear the "recent files" list. Comes with a direct disk viewer for discovering exactly what is on your hard disk.



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Tulsa Computer Society 2/02/2003
Don Singleton, President