Home / Extras / ZAR 9.1 Manual / General usage / Drive selection

Drive selection

This page lists all the drives available for processing, both physical and logical. No specific ordering is enforced. Left panel:

• the physical devices are listed with their models and capacities,
• the partitions are listed under their physical devices, along with a drive letter, filesystem type, and capacity (where known). For the complex volumes the RAID type is indicated.

Right panel provides the detailed information on the selected device. The parameters and their possible values are described below.

	Device type
	Can be one of the following: "Fixed" - non-removable device like a built-in hard disk. "Removable" - removable device like a flash card in an USB card reader. "Image file" indicates that the device image file is used rather than a physical device.

	Model, Capacity, Revision, Serial, Bus type, Location
	These are the parameters of the physical device. The serial number (if available) matches the serial number written on the device itself. The capacity is indicated in binary units (1 KB = 1024 bytes, 1 MB = 1024 KB and so on), and can be smaller than a vendor-specified capacity.

	Filesystem type
	Indicates filesystem type for the partitions, as listed in the corresponding partition table (MBR, GPT, or LDM). This does not necessarily match the actual filesystem type of the volume. The "Dynamic Volume" is the container partition for Windows Dynamic Disks. Unless there was only one Simple Volume on the dynamic disk, it is not recommended to scan the "Dynamic Volume" object.

	Defined by
	Indicates the method used to get the information about the partition. The following values are possible: MBR/Primary - Volume information is found in the old-style partition table directly (this is the primary partition). MBR/Extended - Volume information is found in the old-style extended partition chain (this is the logical drive in the extended partition). LDM (Dynamic) - The information is derived from Windows 2000 or higher dynamic disks (LDM) database. This volume may be a RAID/spanned. GPT - The volume is listed in the GUID Partition Table (GPT). Scan - This entry describes a possible volume found by searching the disk directly (only appears after the scanning for missing partitions). User input - the volume you have specified manually.

	Volume member disks
	Only displayed for the logical drives (simple volumes, spanned volumes, and RAIDs). Provides exact location of the logical drive on the physical device. For a simple volume, there is exactly one member disk entry. For a spanned volume or RAID, there is more than one member disk entry. Offsets and sizes are in sectors (512 bytes per sector, 2048 sectors per megabyte).

	RAID parameters
	RAID type Block size Parity position

	More functions...
	Clicking this button allows you to do the following actions: S.M.A.R.T. information - displays the dump of the device S.M.A.R.T. information. For more details about interpreting this information, please refer to the S.M.A.R.T. quick reference. Define partition manually - only available for the physical devices and allows you to define the partition. Read more on how to define partition manually. Scan missing - only available for the physical devices. For more details, please refer to how to search the device for the missing partitions. Create image file - read more below. Load image file - loads previously created image file. ZAR can load the image file created by third-party software if it is in proper format (plain sector-by-sector copy). Open in a disk viewer - allows you to open both physical device and partition in a viewer. Define RAID manually - input a known set of RAID parameters and create a virtual RAID device using these parameters. Define address translation - force ZAR to consider a hard drive to be of a smaller size (virtual capacity clipping) and/or shift the sector addresses (LBA).

	Create image file
	Use this function to create the image of the device in the file. "Image file" is just a sector-by-sector copy of the device contents. Bad (unreadable) sectors are replaced with zeros (subject to bad sector handling settings). Two restrictions apply: You cannot save the file larger than 2GB on the FAT volume. This is because of the limitation of a FAT filesystem (applicable to both FAT16 and FAT32). Thus, you cannot take an image of the physical disk larger than 2GB and save it to the FAT volume. You cannot take an image file of the image file. This option will be disabled for image files.

<<

Introduction panel

General usage

Analysis run

>>