Unstoppable Copier is a small, free utility that allows you to recover physically corrupt files from a disk that has bad sectors or scratches. Other file copy programs usually just abort or even delete corrupted files, but Unstoppable Copier restores what is left of the damaged files.

You can copy entire directories or, using wildcards (*,?), particular files in a directory. You can also use the tool’s batch mode to configure multiple source and destination folders to copy their contents in one go. You can save this configuration so that the next time you have to perform the same copy operation you can do so with only a few mouse clicks. (This function is also useful for undamaged disks.)

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IZArc claims to be “the best freeware ZIP utility” available. And indeed it is one of the most versatile ZIP applications out there. A screenshot of the application’s window doesn’t reveal anything spectacular but it’s nice to see the GUI without the need of installing the program. So I’ve included one.

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Submitted by Howard Jares

Notepad++ is a free (as in “free speech” and also as in “free beer”) source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Feature list:

• Syntax Highlighting and Syntax Folding
• WYSIWYG
• Auto-completion
• Multi-Document
• Multi-View
• Regular Expression Search/Replace supported
• Full Drag ‘N’ Drop supported
• Dynamic position of Views
• File Status Auto-detection
• Zoom in and zoom out
• Multi-Language environment supported
• Bookmark
• Brace and Indent guideline Highlighting
• Macro recording and playback

Notepad++

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The Windows Explorer is a comfortable tool with which to manage your files. Although it lacks some features, most users would rather live without those features than install a third-party file manager. One way to improve the functionality of Windows Explorer is to enhance the context menu. This has already been achieved by many applications, but Microsoft has yet to come up with an easy way for the average user.

The program FileMenu Tools fills this gap. It creates a new item in the Context Menu of Explorer and opens up various possibilities for customizing it. If you choose the item FileMenu Tools Configuration in the Context Menu of the tool, a GUI will pop up where you can comfortably make your personal adjustments.

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It appears that I’ve never reviewed an undelete tool on 4sysops. I will make up for this omission today. Piriform’s Recuva is a free and easy-to-use file recovery utility. It has to be installed, but if you then copy its executable (Recuva.exe) from its Program Folder to another computer, it will work there without problems. It therefore qualifies as a standalone tool. I think, every admin needs such a tool on a USB stick. How often does it happen that a user tells you an extremely important document has disappeared in mysterious ways and can’t even be found in the Windows Recycle Bin?

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Every once in a while you need to repartition your hard drive; the tools shipped with Windows are sufficient for most of these occasions. Sometimes, however, even Diskpart lacks important features — especially if you have to deal with mixed partition types. Moreover, although there is specialized software for Windows, it is usually not free.

There are various partition tools for Linux. One of these is GParted. If you think that GParted is only capable of dealing with Linux file systems, you may be surprised to read that every option that it offers is also available for NTFS. GParted can detect, read, create, grow, shrink, move, copy, check and label almost every file system. The screenshot below gives you an overview of all supported file systems and functions.

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I think it is a good time to post an article about a free hash/checksum calculator tool because so many impatient IT pros have to compute the checksum of Windows 7 RTM now. There are many such tools out there, but HashCalc is probably the most comprehensive free hash sum computation utility. It supports 13 popular hash and checksum algorithms: MD2, MD4, MD5, SHA-1, SHA-2( 256, 384, 512), RIPEMD-160, PANAMA, TIGER, ADLER32, CRC32, and HMAC. Crypto purists probably will say that HMAC is not really a hash function though.

The download page doesn’t mention Vista as supported OS, but it works fine also on Vista x64. HashCalc calculates checksums of files, text strings and hex strings. SlavaSoft, HashCalc’s publisher, claims you can compute the hashes of files sizes up to 15GB.

I tested HashCalc 2.02.

HashCalc

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I have always wondered why Windows doesn’t allow me to securely erase files. Of course, sometimes we accidentally delete files ; that’s why we have the Windows Recycle Bin. But sometimes we just need the opposite. We have to make sure that no one is able to undelete files from the disk with a file recovery tool. As you are an IT pro, I don’t have to tell how easy it is with these tools to undelete files.

File Shredder is an Open Source tool that allows you to erase files permanently with just a mouse click from your hard disk (but not flash drives). The tool integrates itself in the Windows Explorer’s context menu. To securely delete a file or folder you only have to right click it in Windows Explorer and navigate to the corresponding menu point.

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Update: Readers reported that some antivirus tools detected a trojan in this tool. The AV software I am currently using (AVG) and a few others didn’t detect anything though. Thus it might be a false positive. But just to be sure, I removed the links to GiPo@FileUtilities. I think the tool is not worth the risk.

The GiPo@FileUtilities is a collection of useful file management tools. It has the following functions:

• GiPo@MoveOnBoot – copying/moving/renaming/deleting files and folders on the next system boot
• GiPo@DirMonitor – monitoring changes in the file system
• GiPo@Mount – local folders substitution and local/remote drive mounting
• GiPo@Hardlink – UNIX-like (POSIX) hardlinks for NTFS creation
• GiPo@ReadTest – checking files and folders for read errors

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NetWrix File Server Change Reporter (FSCR) is an easy-to-set-up freeware tool that allows you to monitor file server changes. It audits changes made to files, folders, shares, and permissions. You can create HTML reports manually or let the tool send these by email.

It took me only a few seconds to install and configure FSCR. All you have to do is add the file servers you want to monitor and specify the credentials. The tool adds an entry to the Windows Task Scheduler. By default, it will create a snapshot once a day of each of the file servers.

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Did it ever happen to you that you wanted to move a file and you got the message “This action can’t be completed because the program is opened in another program”? I am sure it did. In most cases you know which application opened the file, but sometimes you are left in the dark. OpenedFilesView helps you to deal with these cases. I reviewed version 1.0 more than two years ago. The current 1.3 release has some useful new features. This is reason enough to write another post and add the tool to the 4sysops free admin tools list.

The main new features are:

• Better Vista support
• Bringing the process to the front
• Hiding system process files, Svchost Files, and files in the Windows folders
• Windows Explorer Context Menu

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As an IT pro, you probably know that deleting data from a hard drive doesn’t ensure that it can’t be recovered with an undelete utility even though you emptied the Windows Recycle Bin. Even if you format a hard disk data it can be recovered. Thus if you take old PCs out of service, you have to wipe all data from the hard disk with an erase tool such as Active@ Kill Disk to ensure that nobody is able to access sensitive data. In particular, PCs that have been used by admins can contain stored passwords or hash codes of passwords which might be in danger once a bad guy gets physical access to the hard drive.

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FlexTK Express from Flexsense is a good example of a GUI tool that allows you to perform tasks that can be done only on the command prompt by operating system means. Its file management capabilities are so sophisticated that only an absolute PowerShell geek would be able to reproduce them with scripts. However, to work with FlexTK Express you don’t have to write one line of code and you can get the job done without consulting a manual. You just have to launch the tool to automate all kinds of file management operations. This is how system administration should always be.

FlexTk Express has three main functions: Search, Orgranize and Sync.

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AcessEnum from Microsoft’s Sysinternals tool collection enables you to list user accesses to a tree of directories or registry keys. With Windows Explorer or a registry editor you can only view access rights for a particular object, a certain folder, for example. If a directory has many subfolders it is difficult to figure out if access rights have been configured properly.

AccessEnum only lists the users and groups who have read or write access and where the deny attribute has been set. In most cases that should be enough though. What I like most about the tool is that it allows you to compare the current configuration with saved settings. This way you can easily find out if someone manipulated access permissions on a certain directory structure. If you right click on a column you can access the folder’s properties and you can also exclude a folder with its subfolders from the list.

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Submitted by costinel

the best file name indexing utility

Publisher’s description:

Locate32 is software which can be used to find files from your harddrives and other locations. It works like updatedb and locate commands in Unix based systems. In other words, it uses databases to store information about directory structures and uses these databases in searches. The use of these databases provides very fast searching speed. The software includes a dialog based application as well as console programs which can be used to both update and access databases. Supported operation systems are Windows 98/ME/NT4/2000/XP/Vista.

locate32

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