HD Guard Pro

Author: Matt Jason H
Published on: 13-02-2004
Views: 31750


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Features

The different functions of the HD Guard Pro...

When the system boots you're presented with the "HotKeys" menu...

 From this menu you can select which mode to boot the PC in, Protected mode is the default setting, and protects the selected partitions from any change until the next restore (by default the next reboot). The other mode is Supervisor, this boots the machine completely unprotected, so files on the partition can be updated, removed or added, if you have protected your main partition you will need to boot in supervisor mode if you wish to install any software permanently.

Of course having everything restored every time you reboot might not sound that appealing to some users. You can use the 'save data' option to make occasional changes you make to the protected partitions permanent after a reboot, or even disable the auto-restore features entirely (by hitting 'set-parameters'), using the 'recover data' feature to instantly restore it as it was at the last boot-up, should you suffer from lost files, a virus infection or just a failed boot up.

Software

The ISRSNSet software

The driver software for the card is called "ISRSNSet", it sits in the taskbar and runs in the background.

Although the added functionality of this software will not be very beneficial if you're a home user with one machine and one card it is a powerful administration tool for anyone running a network with several machines protected by the HD Guard Pro, such as you'd expect to find in an internet cafe, school, office or similar set-up.

[performance=Performance]How the card shaped up in our tests[/performance]

As much as we trust the guys at EksitData, it was time to test their claims that the card could completely restore a data damaged system simply by rebooting.

Our test machine specifications are as follows:

• 2100+ AMD AthlonXP CPU
• ASUS A7N8X-Deluxe Rev1.x Motherboard
• 40.1GB IBM ATA100 Hard Drive
• Windows 2000 Pro

This is where the fun begins, for the first test we tried to completely trash our Windows installation. We simply deleted as much of our "system32" folder and registry as Windows would let us and then rebooted the machine. Without protection there is no doubt that this will produce a failed boot-up, yet when the system rebooted, Windows booted fine, the card had restored all of the files.

For the next test we decided to pit the card against a worm virus. We disconnected the machine from the internet, ran one of the few-hundred 'MyDoom' files in our email inbox, and then used our free online anti-virus to confirm the system was infected. Next we rebooted and ran the check again, the hard-drive had again been restored and the virus gone.

For the last test, we decided to check the cards CMOS/BIOS protection function, we shut down the machine, switched it off at the mains and removed the battery on our motherboard for a few seconds, clearing CMOS settings. Booting the machine back up revealed that the settings had been restored.

The card does have some flaws however, it greatly increased the boot-up time on our system and also affected general system performance. The manual quotes this performance decrease at around 5%, however I'd guess that it was a little more, depending on the type of hard-drive used and of course, the speed of the system.