Posted 10/16/09 at 01:46:42 PM by Paul Lilly

Put away the pitchforks for a moment, because that whole data loss thing involving the Sidekick and Microsoft's Danger unit might not be the Redmond company's fault after all. So who is to blame? Oracle, Linux, and Sun, Microsoft said in not so many words.

"Sidekick runs on Danger's proprietary service that Microsoft inherited when it acquired Danger in 2008. The Danger service is built on a mix of Danger created technologies and third party technologies," Microsoft explained to TGDaily. "Microsoft's other cloud computing projects are totally separate from the Danger Service and do not rely on the Danger Service technology."

There's actually a whole lot more to the story for anyone who cares to read through it all, including a possible sabotage scenario. In short, this could be a situation where it was simply easier to point the finger at Microsoft, justified or not. And more than just pointing fingers, the Redmond company finds itself on the receiving end of two class-action lawsuits alleging that it, along with T-Mobile, failed to "adequately ensure the safety, security, and availability of the data belonging" to Sidekick users.

Read More

Posted 01/20/09 at 12:00:00 PM by Paul Lilly

Some would argue that 'Data loss' is the biggest of the three Ds ('Death' and 'Divorce' being the other two). But no matter how you rank them, few things in life are capable of inducing that same gut wrenching feeling you get from realizing you just deleted a group of files you weren't supposed to, or nuked the wrong partition. Oops!

Lucky for you, several companies have stepped up to the plate with programs that promise to recover your data when you can no longer do so on your own. How can that be? Well, whether you deleted a file or hosed an entire partition, your data isn't actually destroyed, Windows just no longer knows where to look for it. Your files remain until their location is overwritten with new data. For this reason, you'll want to install a data recovery app on a separate drive than the one you're trying to recover data from.

We put eight different data recovery apps to the test -- six of them free, and two that will set you back half a C-note -- and we'll tell you which ones are worth your time and, if applicable, your money.

Hit the jump to get started!

Read More

Posted 07/08/08 at 06:40:41 PM by The Maximum PC Staff

I built an Intel-based system that’s running on a Gigabyte 945P-S3 motherboard. I’m chugging on three SATA hard drives—a 120GB, 250GB, and 500GB. The processor is a Core 2 Duo E6300 running at 1.86GHz, along with 4GB of 667MHz memory and a GeForce 5800 Ultra Extreme 512MB graphics card.

So what’s my problem? The system runs OK with 64-bit Vista Ultimate SP1, but I have a problem with the 500GB drive disappearing. It doesn’t show up in any of the installed diagnostic programs, Windows disk management, or anywhere else. If I swap the power supply connector around, the drive will show up for a while, but then it disappears again. (The power supply is a Thermaltake 800W unit that’s about a year old, and it has swappable plug connectors.)

 Most times a reboot shows the disk in the BIOS as “BzBzBzBz...” What’s going on?

Hit the jump to see what Frank's options are!

Read More