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[Context: I have just spent a few hours of time without any useful result other than a re-aquaintance with my 15 USB flash drives, because of missing, misleading, and/or inaccurate documentation of HDDGuru. In what follows, i do not intend to spend more time retracing my steps exactly, in order to quote perfectly accurately the precise sentences in the documentation which led me astray. I do intend to quote it accurately enough that it should be possible to find quotations i am referring to and correct them. Much more important than this, however, is the feature request that, if implemented, would make the documentation accurate. The problem is one that makes HDDGuru completely useless for me, and for about 50% of computer owners world-wide. For the other 50%, I'm sure the HDDGuru is a very useful program. ]
NOTE: HDDGURU almost certainly is NOT USEABLE on any kind of portable/laptop computer. I cannot say if it useable on any desktop computer either; I am quite sure that the percentage of desktops on which it can be used is declining very rapidly.
The documentation claims that HDDGuru works on SATA drives just as well as on IDE drives. . This is an extremely misleading claim, even if in a court of law it might hold up.
HDDGuru has no SATA support at all, as far as I can tell. I will have to believe the documentation that it supports IDE drives. And for computers with various expansion slots, one can purchase SATA-IDE adapters. The documentation suggests that there are laptop/portable computers with a BIOS that offers an "IDE" or "IDE Compatibliity" mode for the SATA controller. Perhaps there are such laptops -- but not among the admittedly not-quite-random sample of the EIGHT laptops i own and tried to use HDDGURU on. Neither of the SATA cads on my large HP Proliant Server offer such a compatibility mode either.
The only ways to use HDDGuru on a SATA drive are to attach that drive via IDE or to a SATA controller running in compability mode.
In the FAQ, i believe, there is some sentence which asserts that "the only difference between IDE and SATA is the electrical connection, so HDDGuru works on SATA identically to the way it works on IDE." I'm sorry to put it so strongly, but the writer of this FAQ should feel ashamed of him/her-self. This would be like writting on the package of some household electrical appliance: "Works worldwide!! The only differences between electricity supplies worldwide are voltage and frequency, so this appliance will work ANYWHERE!" The kind of marketing which suggests that HDDGuru will work on SATA drives is of a quality that not even manufacturers of washing machines would dare to try. It does no one good to be misleading (if technically correct) in this fashion. Please change the FAQ to give both correct AND useful/honest information: "HDDGURU will ONLY work on SATA drives that are connected to the computer via EITHER IDE (via and IDE/SATA conversion card) or with a BIOS that can run the SATA bus in 'IDE compatibility mode.'" Personally, I wonder if there has been a laptop with such a BIOS sold in the past 5 years.
Somewhere deep in the forum, i did eventually find a post which explained that the author uses and IDE/SATA conversion card. Good for you. Portable computers now account for about 50% of sales of Portable/Desktop computers. It would have saved me a great deal of time and stress had the FAQ given useful and complete information instead of correct but misleading information. The same goes for the beginning of the documentation, which gives all sorts of things to troubleshoot if one's hard disk is not detected, except for the one which is relevant for almost everyone whose harddisk is not detected: "sorry, HDDGURU doesn't support SATA except via conversion to IDE".
Please consider a heartfelt feature request to add SATA support to HDDGuru. I understand the non-trivial nature of such a request. Being a Guru is not something that is static and happens once, like getting a degree or becoming a British nobleman. It is a dynamic committment to mastery of some subject. It is 2020, and I submit that it is simply a sign of either dishonesty or cluelessness to imagine that anything can be an HDDGuru that does not speak SATA natively. Alternatively, change the name of your program to IDEGuru.
On a related note, there is a third lacuna in the documentation -- one that if it were fixed, would have saved me about 30 minutes of the hours i wasted with HDDGuru. At a few places, you suggest one "Look at the registers". I looked at them a lot, but there was no guidance at all as to what it means for them to be "highlighted", so i had no idea if they were or weren't. In my case, with a SATA drive sitting on a SATA bus, it looked to me that the "ERR" register was highlighted red, the "BUSY" register was highlighted green, and ALL of the other registers were highlighted blue. I still have no idea which among these registers was in fact highlighted -- I never saw them in any other color. Is the highlight color for the BUSY register different than the highlight color for the ERR register? And is blue the highlight color for the other registers, or does that mean that they WEREN't set? A few sentences of explanation would be very helpful, given the fact that some one-half of your first-time users (i.e. those with laptops) will, like me, see three colors of highlighting (red, blue and green).
As a final plea for user-friendliness rather than user-hostility, please let me suggest that a first EXTREMELY USEFUL improvement would be to add at least enough SATA support so that you can DETECT that the reason HDDGURU sees no disk at all is that they are on a SATA bus. The way the program works right now -- upon pressing shift-F3, one sees a monumental emptiness, and the only result of deperately trying to choose a disk number is a few more seconds of silence followed by "disk not ready." What a classic case of "blaming the victim!" It is NOT the disk that is not ready, it is HDDGURU that is not ready, it seems, to support the vast majority of hard drives that are in computers today: SATA drives sitting on a SATA bus.
I hope you will be motivated to do the hard work that is undoubtedly needed to enable HDDGuru to "be ready" to take those drives on those buses somewhere useful. I'll bet it's an awesome program. My grandfather would have used it all the time, i'm sure. But if you are not so motivated, or just can't or won't, then please at least take a few minutes to correct the documentation and the faq, so that those of us in 2020 who are looking for a a Guru for the modern world in which we actually live will know to look elsewhere.
with thanks,
scott
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