Comptia A+ Intermediate Flashcards
What type of disk drive uses an 80-wire ribbon cable?
Slower PATA drives (33 MBps and slower) can get by with a 40-pin ribbon cable. Drives that go 66 MBps or faster require an 80-wire cable. The following table shows the types of PATA drives you might see in the field.
What’s the difference between SATA and eSATA?
External SATA (eSATA) extends the SATA bus to external devices, as the name implies. The eSATA drives use similar connectors to internal SATA, but they’re keyed differently so you can’t mistake one for the other.
What is the main problem with PATA ribbon cables?
They impede the airflow inside the PC case.
When were ATA drives introduced?
While ATA drives have been around since the beginning of the PC, they’ve advanced a lot since the early days.
What is a host adapter in relation to SCSI drives?
The SCSI host adapter provides the interface between the SCSI chain and the PC.
What are 2 other names for an ATA drive?
Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE)
Enhanced IDE (IDE)
What is a SATA drive?
Serial ATA (SATA) is the newer ATA drive standard.
What is the main improvement of SATA over PATA drives?
The big news, however, is in data throughput. .. A SATA device’s single stream of data moves much faster than the multiple streams of data coming from a PATA device—theoretically up to 30 times faster.
How many devices can be on a SCSI chain?
up to 15 devices to one host adapter.
What is the SCSI termination rule?
The rule with SCSI is that you must terminate only the ends of the SCSI chain. You have to terminate the ends of the cable, which usually means that you need to terminate the two devices at the ends of the cable. Do not terminate devices that are not on the ends of the cable.
What is this photo depicting?
Master/slave jumpers on a hard drive on a PATA hard drive.
How does Cable Select work?
Many current PATA hard drives use a jumper setting called cable select, rather than master or slave. As the name implies, the position on the cable determines which drive will be master or slave: master on the end, slave in the middle. For cable select to work properly with two drives, both drives must be set as cable select and the cable itself must be a special cable-select cable. If you see a ribbon cable with a pinhole through one wire, watch out! That’s a cable-select cable.
When choosing a drive for your system what are the three types of drives that you may encounter?
SCSI
PATA
SATA
What type of drive has the master/slave concept for drive pairs?
PATA
How many SATA drives can be plugged in to each SATA controller?
One.
SATA supports only a single device per controller channel. Simply connect the power and plug in the controller cable; the OS automatically detects the drive and it’s ready to go.
What could happen if you incorrectly connect a SCSI cable?
You can reverse a PATA cable, for example, and nothing happens except the drive doesn’t work. If you reverse a SCSI cable, however, you can seriously damage the drive. Just as with PATA cables, Pin 1 on the SCSI data cable must go to Pin 1 on both the drive and the host adapter.
When would you need to set a drive as a slave?
PATA drives. If you have only one hard drive, set the drive’s jumpers to master or standalone. If you have two drives, set one to master and the other to slave.
What type of partition can do spanning?
Dynamic Disk
What kind of volume goes across more than one drive?
Spanning Volume
How many partitions does basic disk support?
4
What special setting in the partition table is used to determine which OS to boot from?
Active
Where is the the master boot record (MBR) and partition table stored on the partition?
Boot Sector
What is the identifier that Windows uses to identify different partitions?
Drive Letter
After you create an extended partition what musts you create in it to assaign drive letter?
Logical Drives
What does Microsoft call a hard drive that uses the MBR partitioning scheme?
Basic Disk
What does Microsoft call a hard drive that uses the dynamic storage partitioning scheme?
Dynamic Disk
What is a logical drive called when you assign it as a directory?
Mounted Volume
What type of partitions are designed to support bootable operating systems?
Primary Partitions
What feature in NTFS can you enable on folders and files that will compress them? What is the downside?
Compression
Access time of the data is slower
What feature in NTFS allows you to limit the amount of data users can use?
Disk Quota
What feature in NTFS allows you to encript files and folders
Encrypting File System (EFS)
What file system is support by all Windows OS’s?
FAT
What’s the largest disk partition FAT can create?
2.1 GB
What’s the largest disk partition FAT32 can use?
2 TB
Using the FORMAT command, how would you create an NTFS file system for a D: drive?
format d: /fs:ntfs
What are the 3 ways to create a file system in Windows?
DOS Command Line
My Computer
Disk Management
Hard drive maintenance can be broken down into what 2 distinct functions?
checking the disk occasionally for failed clusters
keeping data organized so that it can be accessed quickly
What are the names of the 2 tools used to check for bad hard drive clusters?
ScanDisk
CHKDSK
What is Windows’ term for a hard drive cluster?
Allocation Unit
What function in BIOS will not allow your system to see a hard drive unless it was installed correctly?
Auto-detection
What are two ways you should check for hard drive connectivity errors?
Inspecting the entire connection system (including electricity) and find any sily mistakes
Remove and reseat the controller (if it’s on an expansion card) if you get an HDD controller failure
What do you need to do to a hard drive to make it able to hold data? Failing to do this would cause a “drive not accessible” error.
Format it
What are the 2 catargories of partitioning failure?
Failing to partition at all
Making the wrong size or type of partition
Which RAID level does not provide data redundancy?
RAID 0—Disk Striping: Disk striping requires at least two drives. It does not provide redundancy to data. If any one drive fails, all data is lost.
To set up software RAID in Windows what utility do you use?
Disk Management.
Which RAID level uses Disk Mirroring?
RAID 1—Disk Mirroring/Duplexing: RAID 1 arrays require at least two hard drives, although they also work with any even number of drives. RAID 1 is the ultimate in safety, but you lose storage space since the data is duplicated—you need two 100-GB drives to store 100 GB of data.
Which RAID level uses Disk Striping to replicate data?
RAID 5—Disk Striping with Distributed Parity: Instead of dedicated data and parity drives, RAID 5 distributes data and parity information evenly across all drives.
Note that if you see an exam question about something called striping with parity, you should assume the question is asking about RAID 5.
What does JBOD stand for?
In your studies and your work as a PC tech, you’ll probably come across the term JBOD, which stands for just a bunch of disks (or drives). This describes any storage system made up of multiple independent disks, rather than disks organized using RAID.
What are the two ways to implement RAID?
All RAID implementations break down into either hardware or software methods.
What is the advantage of a software implementation of RAID?
Software is often used when price takes priority over performance.
What is the advantage of harware implementation of RAID?
Hardware is used when you need speed along with data redundancy.
What is the Windows command line tool for disk error-checking?
You’ll use tools that are generically called error-checking utilities, although the terms for two older Microsoft tools—ScanDisk and CHKDSK (pronounced checkdisk)—are the most popular. Microsoft calls the tool Error-Checking in Windows XP and Vista.
Why is it important to regularly defragment disks?
Fragmentation of clusters can make your drive access times increase dramatically.
(or to put it another way, you systems slows down)
What does the Disk Cleanup tool do?
It finds and deletes trash files that are serving no purpose.
What is the main thing that disk Error Checking tools do?
Whatever the name of the utility, each does the same job: When the tool finds bad clusters, it puts the electronic equivalent of orange cones around them so that the system won’t try to place data in those bad clusters.
How often should you run Error checking on disk drives?
A reasonable maintenance plan would include running it about once a week. Error-Checking is fast (unless you use the Scan for and attempt recovery option), and it’s a great tool for keeping your system in top shape.
How often should you run disk defragmentation on disk drives?
It’s a good idea to defragment—or defrag—your drives as part of your monthly maintenance.
Installing a drive and getting to the point at which it can hold data requires what 4 steps?
Connectivity
CMOS
Partitioning
Formatting
What do ATA drives do to compensate for hard drive sectors going bad?
They automatically replace the bad sectors with hidden sectors
If error checking fails to more important system files Windows needs to load, how will you find those system files?
Get the file from a CAB file.
What command should you use to look for a particular system file in a CAB file?
EXPAND
What should you do if a hard drive dies and it’s not very old?
Look up the warranty and she if you can get a free replacement.
What file type would you save a perfect copy if a CD as?
ISO file
What can cause the biggest problems with obtical drives?
New Installations
What are the 2 most common connectors of optical drives and what are the 2 less common connectors?
PATA and SATA
SCSI and USB
What are the 2 capacities for CD’s?
650 MB and 700 MB
What is the most common way to clean a CD disk?
Clean it with a damp rag.
What is the definition of removable media?
The term removable media refers to any type of mass storage device that you can use in one system and then physically remove and use in another.
What’s the difference between a single-layer DVD and double-layer DVD?
Single-layer means there is only 1 layer of data on the DVD. Double-layer means there are 2 layers of data on the DVD.
What are the two drive letters reserved for floppy drives in Windows?
A:\ and B:\
What is the capacity of a modern floppy disk?
The current floppy disks are 3.5 inches wide and store 1.44 MB.
What are the three steps of installing a floppy drive?
- Ribbon cable. pin 1 to pin 1.
- Power connector. Get it wrong and burn the house down.
- CMOS. Usually already set up for 3.5/1.44
Is it possible to run standard HDD Error checking on a floppy disk?
Yes. You can run Error-Checking on floppy disks, just as you would on a hard drive.
What is a CF flash card?
Memory cards come in a number of different incompatible formats, such as CompactFlash (CF), Secure Digital (SD), and Extreme Digital (xD) Picture Card.
Does it hurt anything to mess with the metal contacts on flash cards?
Of course it does.
Aside from keeping the media clean, there’s not much to do with flash media. Don’t send it through the wash in your jeans (I’ve done this more than once), and don’t touch the contacts on flash memory cards with your fingers.
What are the two types of flash memory?
Flash memory comes in two different families: USB thumb drives and memory cards.
What’s the difference between a thumb drive and a jump drive?
No difference..
USB flash memory drive, also known as the USB thumb drive, jump drive, or flash drive.
What’s the capacity of a single-layer single-sided DVD disk?
4.7 GB
What’s the capacity of a doule-layer single-sided DVD disk?
9.4 GB
What’s the capacity of a dual-layer single-sided DVD disk?
8.5 GB
What’s the capacity of a dual-layer double-sided DVD disk?
17.1 GB
How much data does FireWire transfer per second? What’s special about the transfer of data?
400 Mbps
Sustained data transfer
How much data does Hi-Speed USB transfer per second? What’s special about the transfer of data?
480 Mbps
Burst data transfer
What are the advantages and disadvantages of doing a “clean install” vs an “upgrade install”?
The advantage to doing a clean installation is that you don’t carry problems from the old OS over to the new one, but the disadvantage is that all applications have to be reinstalled and the desktop and each application reconfigured to the user’s preferences.
What do you have to configure in order to do a clean OS installation?
You perform a clean install by resetting your CMOS to tell the system to boot from the optical drive before your hard drive.
What is the Windows Logo’d Products List?
This list is the definitive authority as to whether your component is compatible with the OS. Every component listed on the Windows Logo’d Products List has been extensively tested to verify it works with Windows XP through Windows 7 and is guaranteed by Microsoft to work with your installation.
Formerly known as the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL).
What is an “image installation”?
An image installation is a complete copy of a hard disk volume on which an OS and, usually, all required application software has been preinstalled.
What are locale settings on an OS?
The locale settings determine how date and time information is displayed and which math separators and currency symbols are used for various locations.
What is a multi-boot OS installation?
Both Windows 2000 and Windows XP can install in a separate folder from your existing copy of Windows. Then every time your computer boots, you’ll get a menu asking you which version of Windows you wish to boot.
What is “RIS” in relation to OS installation?
Beginning with Windows 2000 Server, Microsoft added Remote Installation Services (RIS), which can be used to initiate either a scripted installation or an installation of an image.
What is a Windows “stand alone” installation?
One role, called stand-alone, is actually a non-network role, and it simply means that the computer doesn’t participate on a network.
What does EULA stand for?
One of the first things you will do in any Windows install is read through the End User License Agreement (EULA), which you must accept for the setup to continue.
What is the difference between Registration and Activation?
Registration is supplying personal information to Microsoft and is completely optional. Activation is the process of licensing the OS for use.
When something is wrong with the OS, what does Microsoft send out to every computer with the Windows OS on it to fix the problem?
Patch