Disc Basics
Tracks, Writing/reading data, Sectors, Clusters
Formatting
Floppy Discs
5.25" discs, 3.5" discs
Protecting floppy discs
Detecting disc changing
Hard Discs
Cylinders, Heads, Elevator seeking
Calculating disc capacities
Comparison of sector coding
Increasing Disc Capacity (Magnetoresistive, PRML)
Maximum disc handling (LBA)
Head actuators (Stepper motors, Voice coils)
Disc reliability
Disc speed (Access time, Data transfer rate)
Encoding methods (MFM, RLL)
Interfaces
ST506, ESDI, IDE, EIDE
ATA Interface (PIO, DMA, Ultra-DMA)
SCSI
Drives and the BIOS (Entry 47)
SCA, Serial ATA, FireWire
Write precompensation
Cache And Cache Controllers
Read caching, Write caching, Windows caching
Dos Disc Organisation
Data area, Clusters, Master boot record, DOS boot record
File Organisation
Directory
File undeletion
File Allocation Table
Reading a file, creating a file, handling sub-directories
Fragmentation
Using DEFRAG
FAT problems (allocation errors, invalid clusters, lost clusters, cross-linked clusters)
Windows, FAT 32, Long Filenames, NTFS
Initialising a Disc
Low level formatting, Partitioning, High level formatting
Backing up Files
A backup strategy, Using BACKUP, Restoring files, Backup for Windows
Compression Utilities
File compression
Disc compression
CD ROMs
Disc organisation (Construction, CLV, CAV, PCAV)
CD ROM performance
CD Standards (Red book, Yellow book, ISO 9600, CD XA, Green book, CD-Bridge, White book, Blue book, Orange book, Photo CD
DVD
Video standards
Audio standards
DVD writers
Magneto-optical drives
Floptical discs