HDD Sheriff
Off the top, I'll confess to a lifelong fascination with technologies that work "like magic." Although at one level, I'm a fervent technology enthusiast who loves to know how and why these things work, at another, I try to empathize with the average person out there who just wants the machine to work.
Briefly, Jungsoft's HDD Sheriff (US$65) works like magic to restore a hard drive to its original state, simply by rebooting it. The user need not worry about deleting files, corrupting settings or anything else on the disk; it will all be automatically (and surprisingly quickly) restored with a simple push of a reset or power button.
I've been in some circumstances over he past few decades where we really, really needed a product like this one. Most recently, I was the program coordinator and instructor for an Internet course at a local college. We had a classroom of 16 computers, with various software applications installed. In the absence of a product like HDD Sheriff, I set up one "master" disk drive configuration with all the software and then cloned it onto the various machines in the classroom. I put a copy of the master image (created with Norton Ghost, incidentally) away for safekeeping so that if/when a student corrupted an operating system installation or accidentally trashed something important (not a particularly rare occurrence, as it turned out), we could restore his or her machine to its pristine state with a minimum of effort.
I elected not to completely lock down the system privileges so that students could not make control panel or device driver changes, so as to more accurately demonstrate the "real world" fiddling that is all too often necessary with Intel-compatible PCs. The students installed and ran a variety of operating systems: Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000, and several varieties of Linux.
If only I'd had HDD Sheriff! With this product, the administrator sets up the machine once, defining which drives are to be auto-restored (by default, drives C and D, if present, are restored); you can optionally configure one or more drives to not be restored, if you want to set an area of the hard drive for the saving of documents or other files you wish to keep. Then, once the software is installed, you merely shut the machine down and insert a PCI card into an available slot, then power on. (ISA card and external parallel-port compatible versions are also available.) From then on, the machine is protected, unless the administrator uses an "Supervisor Mode" override function to disable the HDD Sheriff. As you might have guessed, the HDD Sheriff uses hard disk space to perform this magic. The Quick Installation settings described above use, by default, a minimum of 400 MB of space. Using the default settings on our test system, with an 8GB hard drive partitioned as C (2GB), D (2GB) and E (4GB), the HDD Sheriff gobbled up the E drive's 4GB (!) of space and appeared to completely destroy my operating system previously living on the drive "E" partition. Indeed, using FDISK to examine the hard drive revealed no logical E drive or extended partition at all.
Miraculously, however, when I uninstalled the HDD Sheriff software, my Drive E returned, still in working order. While I don't recommend trying this, and suspect that extended use of the restoration features would be highly likely to overwrite data on this partition, the fact that it came back working at all was another minor miracle.
There are, of course, a few things administrators using this product should watch out for. One of the most obvious snags would occur if a new device were attached to an HDD Sheriff-protected system. It would load the required drivers, but after a reboot, these would have vanished and the driver disk request would repeat, ad infinitum. Fortunately, the above-mentioned Supervisor Mode makes it easy to solve this problem. The admin boots while holding down the F10 key, disables the protection with a password, and installs the driver. Then, it, too, becomes protected. The software actually has several different administrative modes, including options to set Supervisor Mode for the day, or for one-time access. As well, the protection mode can be configured for auto recovery or manual recovery.
Managers of computer labs should take a close look at HDD Sheriff. It's perfect for simplifying the task of keeping a lab of student machines (or any other disaster-prone machine) perfect running order and protected from viruses, system file changes, data corruptions, accidental reformatting and other PC perils. Recommended.
In Canada, HDD Sheriff is distributed by:
Jon Hodal
Custom Computers
6165 6th Street SE
Calgary, Alberta T2H 1L9
403-531-0480 Main
403-617-1038 Cellular
1-888-496-9093 Toll Free
j...@customcomputersit.com
www.customcomputersit.com
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