How to Uninstall Windows 8 in Just 3 Minutes

Windows 8 might be the biggest launch in OS industry and user upgraded their PC fearlessly from whichever version of Windows they were using to Windows 8, either by clean install or making it dual boot. But it’s true that Windows 8 is failed to leave strong remark of their existence and get mixed reactions from major hardware manufacturer and experts around the world.

Some PC users who upgraded to Windows 8 might not happy with their sudden decision and wants to switch back to Windows 7. At the Windows 8 download page, Microsoft says

If you decide to go back to your previous operating system, you'll need to reinstall it from the recovery or installation media that came with your PC, which is typically DVD media. If you don’t have recovery media, you might be able to create it from a recovery partition on your PC using software provided by your PC manufacturer. Check the support section of your PC manufacturer's website for more information. After you install Windows 8, you won’t be able to use the recovery partition on your PC to go back to your previous version of Windows.

So, if you decided to go back to Windows 7 from Windows 8, take backup of your important files to make sure that you not loose any files that may get formatted during the reinstalling procedure.

Removing Windows 8 from the Dual Boot PC
If the windows 8 is installed on PC as a separate partition along with Windows 7 (dual-boot), you can easily uninstall it by removing that particular partition. Before that, copy/move any important files from Windows 8 partitions to an external media or Windows 7 folder and follow the steps mentioned below.

• Navigate to Start, Run and type msconfig in the open window. Press Enter.
• Find the 'Boot' tab and select the Windows 8 boot option. Choose 'Delete' and select Windows 7 as your primary boot partition or make it your default OS.
• Close msconfig window.
• You also need to format that partition from the 'Disk Management'. To do that, navigate to control panel, administrative tools, computer management and find disk management from the left hand pane. Right click on it and choose format.
• Reboot your PC.

Now, you will no longer see your Windows 8 or any of its content either. But, if you've overwritten Windows 7 partition with Windows 8, you better get prepare for the long go (see next part of this article).

Un-installing Windows 8, Installed by overwriting Windows 7
This step requires having your windows 7 installation media along with the product key. Prior doing anything, create full backup of your entire hard drive as it may completely wipe your PC.

Just boot using your Windows 7 installation media, typically Windows 7 installation CD/DVD or the bootable USB with Windows 7 on it. Follow the same steps as installing Windows 7 for the first time you did and completely format the Windows 8 partition. This will install a fresh copy of Windows 7 and successfully remove Windows 8 with all of its traces.

However, you always able to reinstall Windows 8 again on your PC without any trouble. This tutorial is for users who don't feel comfortable with the glitches of Windows 8 or get hard time to clearly understand this next generation OS. 

Curious kid, more responsible for photo loss on Mac OS X

http://weheartit.com

To be candid, kids are the most wonderful creation of god on this planet loved and cherished by all. There would be hardly any entity on the planet who doesn't share a cordial relationship with children.  Afraid to mention this but many time, especially younger kids attending play schools & elementary schools can pose a serious threat to the data stored on the Mac OS X hard drive. Must not forget that data loss in the form of images, videos, & audios frequently occurs either by human errors or by technical failures. Other than that, few exceptions like a sabotage of the Mac machine & it’s hard drive could also result in the data disaster. And, for all the above misadventures kids are the most suited to be blamed for.

Children, these days usually have access to their parent's laptops, desktops, USBs, & digital cameras. Not to ignore the fact that they learn technology quickly than adults, still there are unfortunate instances available where kids out of knowledge executes those commands which ends up inviting a mess. Accidental deletions of files even on digital cameras are quite frequently reported by their parents. Sometimes, the damage done is huge when an important document or a bank statement is man-handled. However, children are often not to be blamed for the drastic results but yes parents knew what amount of harm they have received in no time.  

As we know, there exist no cure to this problem we can only prevent it to a much extent. Putting the computer away from the child also seems to be illogical and harsh. So, what options do we have them? Trust this; there are few techniques where you can protect your data from peculiar kids. 

For Mac OS X users only: -

• Create a separate user account for your child on Mac OS X & even protect your account with a strong password. That will not only make the OS X safe from the kid but also from unauthorized person.


• Even though you can't create a separate account or share your account password with your child, try to manage your valuable files away from their reach. You can do so by saving your files on a dedicated partition & move all your child related applications to a different partition. In the midst, of all this, keep the boot volume away from your activities as some good amount of space will always be required to boot the Mac faster. Install all the games into volume dedicated for your child.


• If you want to assure the safety of your official files, then always create multiple copies stored on different location. For data less then 2GB, use Dropbox cloud service or Google Drive which are now a great source of free backup.


• These days, we now have external hard drives that can be locked with the help of a key in the form of credit card & works exactly like swapping a transaction. Although, you may have an external hard drive without this feature but in future the demand of such device may go high due to its safety features that prevents data theft to huge extent.


• With the assistance of the Disk Utility<<New Image option, you can create a password protected disk image & transfer the data to the image. Later, mount the disk image to access your files & folders with the help of the chosen password. This feature makes the files ultra-safe from all kind of threats including little children & any other users. The only risk involved in the features is when you loose your password which would deprive you of accessing any files stored on the mounted disk image. Learn to set password protection for important files.

Be aware of other utilities such as file protection tools & of course a Mac photo recovery software that would play an import an role in regaining any of the accidental deleted files.

How to Successfully Clone Your OS and All Programs from Failing Hard Drive

I've come across this question many time on various forums and blogs, where user wants to replace there bad or failing hard drive with another brand new hard drive of larger sizes but unsure on how they can safely move or copy OS and all the program files without loosing data.

So, I've decided to write this to the point article and let user know the safest way of moving OS from bad hard drive to new one without loosing any program or important files.

Disk Cloning is much powerful way which safely makes the exact replica of your bad hard drive without giving any booting failure. Keep in mind that you can't simply copy all the OS files to new hard drive and suppose it to works perfectly, instead it might gives you a series of error message as well as prevent you to access your desktop.

Cloning will easily copy the entire hard drive content i.e., entire OS folder, hidden files, directory structure as well as the booting information (required to boot OS) and place it in the new hard drive without needing you to install a fresh copy of Windows on your new hard drive.

Thereafter, you can easily replace the old hard drive and start using the new hard drive for storing your valuable data and running your OS.

Download disk cloning software, your first step?

Once you realized that the drive goes bad and you've left no choices other than replacing it, purchase a new hard drive of equal or larger size as compare to old one and attach it to your computer as a secondary or slave drive. We'll use this drive to place the cloned copy of old drive and later than, make it as master or bootable drive.

You'll need an efficient drive cloning tool for successfully cloning the drive. Stellar Phoenix Partition Recovery is a complete DIY and packed with  advanced features, which gives you a secure way to clone hard drive as well as an ability to recover partition as well as the containing data when anything goes wrong.

You can download this software from here and install it on your old hard drive. Once you install this software, start it from the desktop or programs menu.

Navigate to Advanced option screen of this software and click on an option entitled Drive Clone.

Select the source drive, which is your problem drive and destination disk would be your new externally attached storage device.


Once you’ve done with this can start cloning the drive. This may take some time depend on the size of the drive and number of available bad sectors and blocks which your hard drive has developed during the course of using it.

Once the cloning process completes, you can now easily replace the problem or bad drive with new drive and later, restore OS and all of your data from it.

Clone copy is ready to use hard drive for your Mac OS X

You would have wished for a ready-to-use backup copy in hand, on an account of a dead Mac OS X. Causes of OS X death could be countless including the logic-board failure, overheating, hard drive failure & grave logical corruptions. Like a human body, computers too will fall ill, hospitalized and treated for medication and & may eventually dies. Unlike a human body, computers can be backed up timely to reuse the information on other machines. All we need is to keep timely backups by our side, in fact backups should be ready to use. External hard drive these days are much of a help & can be used in 3 manners - 

1. Simple Copy & Paste data to/from hard drive
2. Time Machine
3. Clone Copy

The first method is a lay practice followed widely by most users but is inefficient in many cases. Only a part of hard drive minus the other volumes & system information is kept on the external hard drive. The moment Mac system crashes the user could only access the external hard drive backup files after a fresh installation of Mac OS X. Isn't tiresome job? Also, the user had to be active in copying the necessary file on daily basis so that most updated information is backed up. 

The lay practice is soon overcome by the use of Time-Machine & Time-Capsule which does the job on keeping the updated files without intervention of user on regular basis. To do this few time-machine settings are required or make your external hard drive a time capsule for your Mac which takes incremental backup. Upon a Mac crash, Time Capsule will make available all the necessary files updated to the most recent date. Although, the user have to fresh install a Mac again to access the capsule.  

Clone, on the other hand is a supplementary technique that ensures both back-up of the Mac hard drive as well as available source of booting a Mac that crashed. Clone is combination for backup & system restore. A dead OS X Mac can be brought to life within minutes if there exists a ready-to-use clone copy of your hard drive. 

Clone with Disk utility

1. Keep the Mac installation disk ready to start your Mac. Insert the disk into the DVD slot & press C.
2. Now, need to select the language which is 'English' in our case. This will navigates you to open disk utility through Menu<Utilities. 
3. View Restore tab in Disk Utility, mention source drive which is nothing but the Macintosh HD & destination drives which is an external hard drive.
4. Finally, press the mouse click on Restore tab.

This is an absolute free method to clone your boot drive/entire Mac hard drives. What if no installation disk is available with the user which is a most common case? You might not be able to clone your HD in this way & may hunt out for a clone utility.  

Clone with other utility (Stellar Drive Clone)

1. Connect external hard drive to Mac & launch any of the both application.
2. Navigate to the clone window where you can easily select & view source/destination drives. Once the hard drives are defined hit the 'CLONE' button to execute the process. 
3. If your purpose is to extract data from a bad hard drive (bad sectors) then chose Image over clone, which will image a hard drive with good sectors only. 
4. Else, navigate to tools to create a boot DVD & Minimal system disk that restores Mac back to life. 

Cloned copy can be used for other machines of same OS X version & even rules out different Mac models. However, Time Machine backups are not bootable; still they hold multiple variants of your files which a clone does not hold. Choice is yours whether to clone a hard drive or use it as time-capsule. Good for those who have many disks available & are backup concerned can implement one hard drive for TM & another for clone.

Windows 7 taking Forever to Shutdown, Reasons and Solutions

Did Windows 7 taking long time then expected to shutdown? Or, just hang while saying "Windows is shutting down" whenever you wish to turn off the computer. Many were faced this and gets annoyed as sometimes, it can take up to 2 to 4 hours to completely turn off.

Definitely, bunch of installed programs in Windows 7 might cause this, as some programs comes with some sort of services which can't be stopped properly and lets your windows take forever to close. Moreover, few services starts automatically as soon as you start the system and continuously runs in the background making your system freeze or prevents you to perform desired operation.

If you've recently faced this and didn't come up with any working solution, this tutorial might helps you to find the right way of getting out of this error. Remember, stop directly pressing the power button to immediately turn the system off as it can make your system permanently inaccessible or sometimes damage the whole Windows.

Method 1:

• Press 'Window button + R' to open text box and type "regedit" without quotes.
• Navigate to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control" folder and locate the key at the very right Window entitled "WaitToKillServiceTimeout".
  
  
• Change its default value from 20000 to 5000 I.e. 5 seconds. Now the windows is set to wait maximum of 5 seconds for shutting down the service otherwise, Windows will forcibly stop the service and safely turn off the computer.
  Note: You can't reduce this value to lower than 5 seconds, so don't try to do that. 
  
  [Also Read: Hard Disk Failure Symptoms & Increase Hard Disk Life Span]

Method 2:

If you've Windows 7 running on LAN connections or any other type of networks, consider updating your network drivers and uninstall the old drivers. Network drivers is not responsible for long shutdown period in all cases but sometimes windows faces difficulties to send command to loose the network connections and as results, remains at the same shutdown screen for a long time.

Method 3:
Remove any externally connected device(s) like USB, flash drive, floppy drive etc. And then reboot the system. See if windows still throws the same error. Bad or failing hard drive could also cause this and so why, you're recommended to run hard drive or memory test, if this happens always whenever you choose to shut down your PC.

Method 4:

Try to run your system in safe mode or clean boot mode to come up with any faulty or outdated drivers. Once you find the driver, consider replacing it with an updated one or completely removing it from the system.

If you've sorted out this problem with another trick, don't forget to write it here in comment section.

Format Recovery - Recover Data after Formatting

Table of Contents

1. The Possibility of Data Recovery after Formatting

2. Free Download Data Recovery Software to Recover Files after formatting

3. The Possibilities That You May Perform a Formatting

4. What You Should Pay Attention to When You Lose Data after Formatting?

 

The Possibility of Data Recovery after Formatting

When you perform a formatting on a storage device such as memory card, hard disk, flash drive, or external hard disk drive etc; the data inside the storage device will be erased and get lost. However, it is still possible to restore the lost data with format recovery software. As a matter of fact, the deleted files after formatting are still intact inside the storage device. With the help of format recovery software, it is possible to recover lost photos, videos, music, documents, images etc after formatting. In this article, I would like to recommend two kinds of powerful format recovery software to you.

Download the Following Software to Recover Data

	#1 Data Recovery Software to restore data off usb drive, memory card, pen drive, hard disk, external drive etc. How to use: best disk recovery software for step by step guide	#1  must try recovery software
	#2 Data Recovery Software Another chance for you to recover data from disk, card, external etc.    How to use: Windows data recovery steps	#2  must try recovery software
	#3 Data Recovery for Card USB - recover data from card/usb  How to use: memory card recovery tutorials	#3 must try recovery software

Free Download Data Recovery Software to Recover Files after formatting

This format recovery software (iCare Data Recovery ) to recover data after formatting
It is free and it only has a small size, so you can easily download and install it to your computer. It only takes up a little resource of your computer.

Download iCare recovery  

Step1. Connect the storage device like to the computer. Once you have installed the format recovery software on your computer successfully, launch the software and choose the "Format Recovery" module for data recovery after formatting.

Step2. Choose the partition where you need to recover lost files and click "Recover" button, after which the program will begin to scan the selected partition in order to find the lost data.

Step3. After the scanning, you can see a partition list that contains all the partitions the software has found. Choose all the partitions and click the "Show Files" option to view all the files. Select all the files and click "Files Preview" button to preview those found files.

Step4. Mark all the files you want to recover and click "Save Files" button. Then choose a partition and create a new folder to save the selected files. Stop saving the selected files to the original partition in order to avoid original data being overwritten.

The following format recovery software(Stellar Data Recovery for Windows) for format recovery

Download Stellar for Format Recovery

The second format recovery software is also free and the steps are very easy as below:

Step1. Download and install the software to your computer. Launch the software and choose a recovery module for your case.

Step2. Choose the drive where you want to recover data and click "Start Scan" button. Then the software will scan the drive you selected and search for the lost files.

Step3. The whole scan process will be short; you only need to wait patiently while the scanning.

Step4. After scan, you can preview all the found files and save them to any other partition instead of the original one.

The Possibilities That You May Perform a Formatting

Although it is possible to recover lost data after formatting, the chance of formatting recovery depends on how you format the partition. For example, if you format the partition by accident and you haven’t written any new data to the formatted partition before data recovery; the chance of data recovery is extremely good. However, if the partition has not formatted error and forces you to perform a formatting; you should be careful with this situation. You have two choices for this situation, either format it or not format it. And the result will also be completely different. If you format the partition, the not formatted error may disappear but the data inside will be erased and the chance of data recovery is not good. If you don’t formatthe partition, you will have no way to access the data inside but the data can be recovered with format recovery software.

What You Should Pay Attention to When You Lose Data after Formatting?

1. No more new data to the formatted partition

Any new added data to the formatted partition will overwrite the lost files and make the data recovery difficult or even impossible.

2. No physical damage to the formatted partition

Once the partition has suffered physical damage, the data recovery is impossible. 

References

Undo Format Recovery

Free recover lost data from formatted hard drive, USB flash drive, memory card, pen drive and more other devices...

Freeware to Recover Files after Formatting

Get free data recovery software to recover files after formatting memory card, hard drive, pen drive, external hard drive, memory stick or other storage devices...

Memory Card Format Recovery

How to recover deleted data from memory card like SD card, CF card, XD card etc after formatting...

Freeware for Format Recovery

Have you ever format any storage device like memory card or hard disk drive? Do you know lost data due to formatting can be recovered...

RAW External Hard Drive Recovery

This is a video tutorial to show you how to recover data from a raw external hard disk drive...

data recovery on external hard drive

you are able to recover data from an external hard drive as long as the lost files are not overwritten...

What Is Data Recovery

Data recovery is a process to recovering data when got lost from storage media...