HDD GURU FORUMS

I use MHDD daily now for hours but using one PC in DOS for one disk is starting to become outdated. And then using many pcs to do one thing seems like a waste of resources. I need to do multiple tasks at the same time.

I was wondering if any body tried using VM's and boot the MHDD iso with multiple disks connected and doing for example ERASE on one disk, scan on another and something else on a third until i run out of ports.

Is this possible. I have not tried it.. yet. Just wondering if that can cause some issues?

Any comment? I am going to try it anyway- just looking for opinions.

I've tried it on VMWare. Unfortunately, that virtualization platform was "too good" - they even emulate IDE/SATA ports. Basically, MHDD will only see the virtual drive

However, there are other means of virtualization that I didn't have a chance to try. Also, there is a possibility that you can do that even under vmware if they have some settings to forward "real" ports.

Victoria and SpinRite will work on VMWare, however, they will work only if the hard drive contains no bad sectors, which defeats their purpose entirely. As soon as an error is encountered on the drive the tools are running on, VMWare throws up an "Abort/Retry/Continue" dialog (is this still MS-DOS or what???). Clicking Retry or Continue will simply bring up the dialog again. Enough said.

Hmmm. Yea its not a great idea to virtualise these tools.
Instead i have substituted functions with other windows based tools- thats good because i can run multiple instances of them - accessing multiple physical ports.

ie Run HDDWIPE tool several times- hot plug sata - and remove insert x-number of usb devices and it will always complete that function it was meant todo.

And can run other windows based software while other programs are doing other things. I dont think it should be used for recovery- i was just looking for a way to analyse,wipe extract data from multiple drives at one time.

Probably easier to get another desk and 3-4 cheap old PCs

And one KMV switch

Probably easier to get another desk and 3-4 cheap old PCs

Yea that is obvious- but the topic is running multiple MHDD's or Software based on DOS to speed up things using ONE computer.
The limit here is DOS. And VM is not that friendly in what wants to applied here.

The answer is to get Windows Based -or- Linux -or- ... that can run multiple instances and operate direct with I/O ports.

Maybe its just worth sitting down - cracking them knuckles and trying to write something that will support hot swap detection on sata (ide will pose a problem in windows) that can run multi threaded processes like - surface scan, erase, secure erase and some other basic stuff....

It will beat opening up multiple windows of victoria, hddscan or hdderase.. and getting confused.

Can anybody suggest a multiport 3.5 / 2.5 hot swap bay or stand that can support like 4+ more drives?