Mr. Fix-It

Nothing makes you feel more frustrated than a hard drive that's crashed. Hard Drive Mechanic Deluxe gives you back your self-respect by automatically repairing bad FATs, disk partitions, boot sectors--and other geeky gobbledygook that becomes supremely important when a PC's gasping its last. Plus, Hard Drive Mechanic Deluxe will be your canary in a coal mine, giving you advance warning about key mechanical and electronic-drive components that are soon to be silicon has-beens. Your choice: Crash and burn, or crash and learn.

Hard Drive Mechanic Deluxe

Street price: $45

Requires: Windows 3.1, DOS and Windows 95/98, 8MB RAM (installs from a floppy disk in floppy-disk drive), Windows 95 OSR2 or Windows 98 boot disk

Higher Ground Diagnostics

Lawrenceville, Georgia

(770) 956-7276

http://www.highergroundsoftware.com

J.W. Dysart (joedysart@aol.com), a software analyst and Internet business consultant, has written for more than 40 publications, including The New York Times.

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This article was originally published in the October 1999 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Mr. Fix-It.