Thank you for your interest in purchasing DriveSitter!
You can find the current prices here: http://www.otwesten.de/drivesitter/pricing.php
Please order your license(s) here: http://www.otwesten.de/drivesitter/order.php
or contact the sales department by our Contact Form.

Don’t do it! The unlock key is personalized to the name of the licensee. Not only is the licensee legally liable for any unauthorized publishing of his unlock key, but the unlock key will also be blacklisted in the future.
Therefore, please keep your unlock key secret!

Ensure that you typed the name of the licensee exactly as it is provided with the unlock key. Ensure that the serial number is correct. Instead of typing the rather long unlock key, consider to copy it from the email and paste it into the unlock key edit box. When the unlock key was received via email, it is occasionally split into several lines. Please type the unlock key in one single line without any spaces or breaks.
Please contact the sales department if the unlock key is still not accepted. Your unlock key will be checked and most likely replaced.

All unlock information is sent by email from otwesten.de without exception.
If you are unsure whether your unlock information is genuine, please contact the sales department and provide the name of the licensee and the serial number (but do not include the unlock key itself).

In your own interest, do not start any pirated version of DriveSitter, any crack or key generator!
We know most of these pirated versions; some of them contain viruses or trojans and most of them do not work correctly or may even be harmful to your system.
You may contact the technical support to help us fighting software piracy.

Yes. Please contact the sales department.

In the "Help" menu (at the very right of the application main window), click either "Unlock" or "About".
Your license information including the name of the licensee and the serial number will be displayed.
The unlock key will never be displayed. Please keep your unlock information safe.

This service is officially not offered or guaranteed: Unlock keys will generally not be replaced.
Nevertheless, do not refrain from contacting the sales department as they may be able to help you by whatever means.

You are granted to evaluate the fully functional shareware version of DriveSitter for 30 days. Within this trial period, the functionality of DriveSitter is not restricted. After the trial period, the shareware version of DriveSitter will stop working and you will be reminded to either purchase a license of DriveSitter or remove it from your computer.

Thank you for your interest in purchasing DriveSitter!
You can find the current prices here: http://www.otwesten.de/drivesitter/pricing.php
Please order your license(s) here: http://www.otwesten.de/drivesitter/order.php
or contact the sales department by our Contact Form.

You may distribute the unmodified shareware version of DriveSitter but you may not demand money for it. If you like to distribute DriveSitter as part of a shareware collection (e.g. on a "shareware CD"), you may not explicitly charge the customer for the contained copy of DriveSitter.
Contact the sales department if you need an explicit written permission for distribution.

We are very sorry that your trial period ended prematurely. The shareware protection of DriveSitter was carefully designed and thoroughly tested on many different computer systems. Until now, every time a premature end of the evaluation period occurred on our test systems, it could be ascribed to a changed system date/time. This may occur if your computer clock is reset (e.g. when your CMOS battery is low or a hardware error occurred), when you use a program that automatically synchronizes your computer clock or if you adjusted the computer date/time by hand. Unfortunately, this restriction had to be part of the shareware protection. The next release version will grant you a new trial period.

DriveSitter closes all floating satellite windows when it is minimized to the system tray notification area or completely hidden in order to keep memory and CPU consumption as low as possible.

"Sort by percentage" is a special function that allows you to use special sorting algorithm. Whenever the list changes, the special sort order gets lost. This is by design.

Just start DriveSitter again. The new instance of DriveSitter will find the first one and directs it to redisplay the main window.

You need to enable this feature for each hard disk drive separately. Open the options manager (CTRL+O) and in the options subtree of the respective drive the "Drive Temperature" test. Check "Display temperature in system tray".

The accuracy of the displayed drive temperature depends on the auto-polling frequency of the temperature attribute. The tray icon make only little sense, if you decided for whatever reason to turn off the auto-polling. If this is the case, DriveSitter prevents misinterpretation by striking through the temperature in the system tray thus reminding you to manually poll the temperature.

This happens if the Windows font mapper was unable to find an appropriate font for the default font size required by DriveSitter or - what is much more probable - if you changed the temperature scale to Fahrenheit, Kelvin or Rankine which need 3 digits to fully display instead of the 2 digits required by Celsius and Réaumur.
Open the options manager (CTRL+O) and pick the "Tray Temperature" option page. Click on the "Font" button to select another font or a smaller font size.

The percentage bar can only be calculated if you tell DriveSitter a maximum temperature threshold which it should consider to be the "worst desirable case" for the respective hard disk drive.
Open the options manager (CTRL+O) and in the options subtree of the respective drive the "Drive Temperature" test. Enable the temperature test, ensure that "Display temperature in system tray" is checked and check "Enable drive temperature test. Enter the maximum desirable drive temperature in the textbox to the right of "Start notification action if drive temperature exceeds".

These settings only make sense if at least one hard disk drive currently recognized by DriveSitter reports drive temperature.
To check this, open the options manager (CTRL+O) and in the options subtree of each drive the "Drive Temperature" test. At the very top of the page, you can see the currently selected temperature attribute of the respective drive or - in this case most probable - "[no temperature attribute]".

A "BAD" S.M.A.R.T. status commonly indicates a high probability of an upcoming drive failure or data loss. It is strongly recommended that you immediately save all important data from the affected volumes and replace the drive as soon as possible. After your data is backed up, you might want to run scandisk with thorough surface testing. See if you still have warranty claims on the hard disk drive. You might also want to inspect the S.M.A.R.T. attributes of the drive and read the tooltip explanation of the attribute name.

First of all, until the S.M.A.R.T. status is not "BAD", the hard disk drive is still healthy. A "RISK" status indicates, that at least one user-defined S.M.A.R.T. test failed. User defined S.M.A.R.T. tests are extended tests on the polled S.M.A.R.T. attributes that are commonly setup to detect malicious conditions before they occur. Calm down. Check out which test induced the RISK condition (you may inspect the last test report by pressing CTRL+R) and consider whether the test parameters should be adapted. Observe the attribute values of the questionable S.M.A.R.T. attribute. If it stabilizes, there might be no reason to be concerned. If it keeps on falling or exceeds its threshold, consider backing up all your data immediately.

The report of "n/a" in the S.M.A.R.T. status column means that the S.M.A.R.T. status for the hard disk drive is not available. There a at least four imaginable reasons for the "n/a" status:

1) The hard disk drive does not support S.M.A.R.T.. This is relatively unlikely until the HDD is very old (lets say more than 5 years).
2) S.M.A.R.T. is disabled in the computer BIOS. This setting should not affect the capabilities of DriveSitter, but you might nevertheless ensure that S.M.A.R.T. is enabled in the BIOS.
3) The S.M.A.R.T. status reported by the hard disk drive does not comply with the ATA/ATAPI specifications. If this is the case, the status reported by the drive can not be correctly interpreted. You might want to refer to the specifications of your hard disk drive or contact the manufacturer of the drive for further information.
4) The computer systems power-saving feature set the drive in power saving mode (the drive "sleeps"). The S.M.A.R.T. status will be displayed correctly after the next poll on a non-sleeping drive.

Please read at least the first 2 pages of the introduction to T.E.C. date calculation in the program help file. A T.E.C. date alert might be a valid forecast or an invalid forecast and thus should concern you or not, so calm down. First of all, inspect the attribute Graph of the respective attribute by double-clicking on the attribute in the middle pane. Check whether the predicted trend can be ascribed to high, random-like variation. You should be concerned if the S.M.A.R.T. attribute values either constantly fall off over time or suddenly started dropping and the linear approximation (the green, dashed line) well fits the data points. Have a close look at the questionable S.M.A.R.T. attribute the next hours and days and check whether the trend changes. If the trend does not change, consider backing up all your data!
To prevent false alarms, you might increase the S.M.A.R.T. polling interval up to 3 hours (maximum recommended) and tweak the general T.E.C. options. If the T.E.C. dates are reported for S.M.A.R.T. attributes that show a high variation (inspect the graph by double-clicking on the attribute), you might want to disable T.E.C. date calculation for the respective S.M.A.R.T. attribute in the T.E.C. test options of the hard disk drive and setup a S.M.A.R.T. attributes limits test for the attribute instead.
Since DriveSitter v1.2, instead of disabling the T.E.C. test for the attribute, you may better set a T.E.C. alert threshold for the respective S.M.A.R.T. attribute. Refer to the T.E.C. Test options for details.

Use the new HDD a few weeks and see whether the variation diminishes. In most cases, the attribute variation normalize within the first 3 weeks.

No, you should not be concerned, although this is not considered to be a "normal" behavior, it can be randomly observed. Keep an eye on those attributes, maybe override the attributes limits test and set an alert threshold for the T.E.C. test of the respective attribute.

Yes, you should be concerned! Most manufacturers recommend that the drive temperature should not exceed 55°C / 131°F and must not exceed 60°C / 140°F. The temperature thresholds of specific HDDs may be different depending on the location of the temperature sensor; refer to the manual of the hard disk drive for model-specific settings.

First of all, check whether it is probable that the reported temperature is valid: The temperature should rise after the computer was turned off for a while and slowly approach the maximum temperature. If you are in doubt about the correctness of the temperature report, refer to Test Options - Drive Temperature in the program help.

Second, if you are sure the temperature is reported correctly, you should power down the computer or the HDD (if possible) immediately to prevent serious hardware damage and/or data loss. If the HDD did run for a very long time (over days or weeks), you should previously back up your most important data as quickly as possible and then power down the computer. While backing up the data, you should lower the environmental temperature (open a "real" window), try to open the computer case (but keep warranty issues in mind), stop all intense graphic applications, CD/DVD burning and other computations. Ensure that all computer case fans are not too dirty and function properly.
Contact your local computer store and ask for a solution.

The manufacturer of the HDD defines the threshold of a S.M.A.R.T. attributes to be 0 to indicate that those attributes are non-crucial to the drive health status; those attributes can be considered to be performance-related only. Read more about that in Interpreting S.M.A.R.T. Data of the Introduction chapter in the program help.

You should generally perform a Self-Test on a drive if you have suspicion that your hard disk drive is in an unhealthy state or if you do not know anything about the condition of your hard drive. In the first case, you might have heard strange sounds emitted from your hard drive, experienced a low performance or have even received S.M.A.R.T. warnings. The latter case is imaginable if you just purchased a used hard disk drive from somebody else, for example. In neither case you should execute Self-Test without any reason.

For whatever reasons you decided to execute a Self-Test, we highly recommend to backup all your data before the test. Imagine the following situation: You drive your car and hear some strange sounds coming from the engine. You have suspicion that there may be something wrong with the motor, so you decide to get on the freeway and just test it out. If the sound gets louder or the engine breaks down, well, you know that your suspicion was well-founded. Anyway, you are lost somewhere on the freeway without a working car.

This example hopefully illustrates what happens analogically to your hard drive in a Self-Test. Under normal conditions, this is not a problem for your hard drive at all, as it is no problem for your car to have a quick ride on the highway. Under potentially unhealthy conditions however, such a Self-Test may cause a fatal breakdown.

So should you execute a Self-Test? The answer is Yes if - and only if - you have suspicion that your hard drive is in an unhealthy condition and you have already created a backup of all your data.

DriveSitter currently supports a Short Self-Test, an Extended Self-Test and the Conveyance Self-Test. The Selective Self-Test is currently not supported by DriveSitter.

The Short Self-Test takes only few minutes to finish and tests some vital functions of the hard drive. We recommend that you always execute the Short Self-Test first because it is - well - short and does not impose too much load on the hard drive that might already be in an unhealthy condition. If the Short Self-Test already fails, you do not have to execute any other Self-Test but backup your data immediately (if you have not done so as suggested in the previous F.A.Q. item) and see whether you have still warranty on the drive.

The Extended Self-Test typically takes not much less than an hour on modern hard drives to complete. Execute the Extended Self-Test only if you have strong suspicion that your hard drive is in an unhealthy condition, you already executed the Short Self-Test without failure and you backed up all your data on the drive.

The Conveyance Self-Test is intended to detect drive failures that are caused by conveyance (transportation). It takes about tens of minutes to complete on modern hard drives. Execute this Self-Test only if you have strong suspicion that your hard drive was damaged by a transport or similar and you backed up all your data on the drive.

After DriveSitter has initiated the Self-Test, the test procedure is being executed independently on the hard disk drive. The only possibility for DriveSitter to stop an executing Self-Test is to issue some special commands to the drive. Although the ATA/ATAPI standard requires all conformant drives to implement these commands, some drives fail to support them properly. Since some Self-Test may take more than an hour to complete, DriveSitter attempts to determine whether these special commands are supported by the drive beforehand and displays a warning message if it is likely that the drive does not support aborting an executing Self-Test.

You should avoid aborting an executing Self-Test in every case, and if you do not plan to abort the Self-Test, you can ignore the warning and proceed with the test.

If the Self-Test takes much longer than expected or if you must abort the Self-Test for whatever reason, you will always have the possibility to click on the "Abort" button. If the Self-Test indeed cannot be aborted, DriveSitter offers you the opportunity to leave the Self-Test dialog of DriveSitter and you can safely shutdown the computer. A shutdown, a hardware reset or a power down should always safely abort any executing Self-Test, so there will always be a last resort.

As described above, the test routine is executed independently on the hard disk drive after DriveSitter has initiated it. In order to abort the test procedure, DriveSitter issues certain commands to the drive. Although the ATA/ATAPI standard requires all conformant drives to implement these commands, some drives fail to support them properly. Therefore DriveSitter attempts to determine whether the drive supports these commands beforehand, but the drive may behave differently while a Self-Test routine is in progress. It is unfortunately impossible for DriveSitter to safely predict this malpractice.

DriveSitter asks the drive which Self-Test routines it supports by some commands the ATA/ATAPI standard requires all conformant drives to implement. Unfortunately, some drives spuriously report support for certain Self-Test routines that are in fact unsupported by the drive. Unfortunately, the truth about whether a certain Self-Test routine is supported is only found in an attempt to execute these Self-Test routine.

Failure of execution of a certain Self-Test routine does not imply certain conditions of the drive (maybe apart from the fact that the firmware has some bugs). The drive condition may be good or the drive may be just about to fail. Please try to execute another Self-Test routine.

The hard disk drive manufacturers provide an estimation for the time that a Self-Test routine takes to complete under normal circumstances and if the drive is in good condition. If the condition of the drive is bad, the Self-Test may take much longer to complete just because the execution of malfunctioning parts of the Self-Test may take longer and the drive may attempt to retry certain steps.

Abort the Self-Test only if it takes about four times as long as the estimated time and you do not want to wait any longer. In most cases, your hard disk is on error. You may also want to execute the Short Self-Test on the drive and see whether it reports drive failure.

As described above, the test routine is executed independently on the hard disk drive after DriveSitter has initiated it. In order to provide a progress, DriveSitter periodically polls the drive for the current progression and state. The progress of the Self-Test is reported by the drive as defined in the ATA/ATAPI standards. Unfortunately, some drives do not implement the progress report properly or the drive sometimes reports invalid progression data. The result of this misbehavior is that the progress may jump around arbitrarily or is even moving backwards.

Please have a look at the result of the Self-Test routine that is displayed in the log of the Self-Test dialog. The Self-Test routine always finishes with one of the following results:

Passed
The Self-Test routine finished successfully and no errors were detected. You should be happy that your drive is functioning that well!

Aborted
The Self-Test routine ended prematurely, in most cases because of a user break. Unhealthy conditions might not be detected, but even if unhealthy conditions were detected, the drive does not report them since the test routine has been aborted. The tested drive might or might not be in a critical condition.
If the drive is functioning well and the drive's S.M.A.R.T. status is OK apart from this error, you should not be more concerned than before execution of the Self-Test.

Unknown
This is really an exceptional Self-Test result that indicates that DriveSitter is unable to interpret the Self-Test result. Either DriveSitter encountered an internal error, or the tested drive does not comply with the ATA/ATAPI standards. Unfortunately, we cannot say anything about the condition of the tested drive. We are very sorry for the inconvenience.

Fatal Error
The Self-Test routine encountered a fatal error and ended prematurely; in most cases this is caused by an internal error. Unhealthy conditions may be undetected. Even if unhealthy conditions were detected before the fatal error occurred, the drive does not report them. The tested drive might or might not be in a critical condition, however, the occurrence of the fatal error is not necessarily related to a critical condition, or in plain English, the occurrence of the fatal error does not mean that the tested drive is necessarily defect, nor does it exclude this possibility.
If the drive is functioning well and the drive's S.M.A.R.T. status is OK apart from this error, you should not be more concerned than before execution of the Self-Test.

FAILED
The Self-Test routine finished successfully and detected critical conditions of the drive. You should definitely be concerned and backup your data immediately! DriveSitter also displays a warning message box if the Self-Test fails.

By the way, the test result log entries provide a tooltip if you move the mouse over the entry.

This means that the Self-Test routine encountered a fatal error and ended prematurely; in most cases this is caused by an internal error. Unhealthy conditions may be undetected. Even if unhealthy conditions were detected before the fatal error occurred, the drive does not report them. The tested drive might or might not be in a critical condition, however, the occurrence of the fatal error is not necessarily related to a critical condition, or in plain English, the occurrence of the fatal error does not mean that the tested drive is necessarily defect, nor does it exclude this possibility.
If the drive is functioning well and the drive's S.M.A.R.T. status is OK apart from this error, you should not be more concerned than before execution of the Self-Test.

This means that the Self-Test routine finished successfully and detected critical conditions of the drive. You should definitely be concerned and backup your data immediately!

The Self-Test log can be empty for two reasons: Either no Self-Test was executed until now or the drive does not support logging of Self-Test results. In the latter case, you can often determine the status of the last executed Self-Test in the Drive Details floating satellite window: Double-click on the drive in the main window of DriveSitter. In the popup window, search for the entry "Last Self-Test" in the "S.M.A.R.T." section. The displayed value will give you a hint about the last Self-Test result.

Unfortunately, the current version of DriveSitter does not support Self-Test functionality on USB drives.

Since version 1.6, DriveSitter supports up to 32 S.M.A.R.T. capable ATA/SATA as well as Western Digital USB drives on Windows 2000/XP/Vista. RAID, SCSI or USB drives of other manufacturers are not supported.

Unfortunately, DriveSitter does not currently support RAID. DriveSitter works with most RAID controllers if the RAID feature is disabled.

The SCSI standard does not support S.M.A.R.T. the way the ATA/ATAPI standard (for IDE drives) does: SCSI drives report the overall S.M.A.R.T. status, only, but do not report individual attributes. Much of the functionality DriveSitter offers is based upon the retrieval of individual attributes (like Attribute Graph, Attribute Statistics, Attribute Limits Test, T.E.C. Test etc.).
Unfortunately, DriveSitter does not currently support SCSI drives.

This is a known bug in DriveSitter versions prior to version 1.20 on Windows NT/2000/XP systems. This bug is cosmetic only and does not have any impact on the functionality of DriveSitter. Please update your version of DriveSitter.

DriveSitter can only report the current drive temperature if the drive is equipped with a thermal sensor and reports the temperature in one of the typical S.M.A.R.T. temperature attributes (e.g. 194). If your hard disk drive uses other S.M.A.R.T. attributes to report the drive temperature, refer to Test Options - Drive Temperature in the program help for further proceeding.
If you are a registered user and can not find a solution by yourself, please email to the technical support.

Please contact the technical support to create a bug report. Thank you!

A "BAD" S.M.A.R.T. status commonly indicates a high probability of an upcoming drive failure or data loss. It is strongly recommended that you immediately save all important data from the affected volumes and replace the drive as soon as possible. After your data is backed up, you might want to run ScanDisk with thorough surface testing. See if you still have warranty claims on the hard disk drive. You might also want to inspect the S.M.A.R.T. attributes of the drive and read the tooltip explanation of the attribute name.

Every S.M.A.R.T. attribute has some flags defined by the HDD manufacturer. A flag is a data entity that can be either set or cleared. DriveSitter abbreviates the flags by one lowercase letter and displays only the flags that are "set" for the attribute. Read more about that in Interpreting S.M.A.R.T. Data of the Introduction in the program help.

While the S.M.A.R.T. standard implies that the power on hours count raw value should contain hours, some manufacturers report minutes, half minutes or even seconds instead.

The interpretation of raw S.M.A.R.T. attributes values is not easy, because the ATA/ATAPI specifications do not bind the manufacturers to a specific raw data format. Some manufacturers use a rather proprietary format to store raw data, what makes a general approach of interpreting the raw data relatively hard. Errors are likely to occur.

The HDD does only report the IDs of the S.M.A.R.T. attributes, but not its descriptive name. Since some manufacturers use proprietary attributes and keep information about the attribute meaning secret, some attributes might not be translatable by now. In particular, there are many Maxtor attributes completely unknown by now. Check for updates of DriveSitter or for updated "attrib.ini" files on http://www.otwesten.de/drivesitter/down.php.

DriveSitter just displays what the hard disk drive reports. In this case, the described constellation is false by logic. Unfortunately, it happens more often than not that the HDDs report such inconsistent S.M.A.R.T. worst value information. This is not a bug of DriveSitter! If DriveSitter detects the condition described above, it colors the worst value gray.

(1) The unit-base used to designate the total capacity of hard disk drives is defined to be 1.000 by most manufacturers, e.g. 1 KB = 1.000 B; 1 MB = 1.000*1.000 B etc. while the common unit base for computer memory is 1.024. The capacity of the volumes is reported using a unit base of 1.024 as Windows does while the capacity of the hard disk drives is reported using a unit of 1.000 as most HDD manufacturers define. DriveSitter version 1.6 and above use KB/MB/GB if base 1.000 is used and KiB/MiB/GiB if base 1.024 is used.
(2) Some space get "lost" when a hard disk drive is partitioned and formatted.
(3) DriveSitter reports partitions that are recognized by the currently running Windows operating system only.
(4) The free space on WinNT based systems is computed for the active user.

Some versions of Windows truncate the displayed value after conversion to another unit, DriveSitter correctly rounds it. You can check the Windows bug by repeatedly dividing the number of bytes by 1.024 (for MB divide 2 times, for GB divide 3 times) and round the result.

No, in most cases there is no good reason to do so. While DriveSitter is displayed, you might want to see the updated volume information. When DriveSitter is minimized to the system tray notification area or completely hidden, the auto-update function is automatically disabled until DriveSitter’s main window is restored. In the meantime, the auto-update function does not use a single timer or handle.

You can only disable the monitoring of the volumes free space, not the monitoring of the arrival of new volumes. The latter function does not use any resources as long as no new volume is mounted or no volume is unmounted.

By default, DriveSitter is configured to automatically check for updates every 21 days. Basically, it will not retry to connect for the next 21 days if it detects that no update is available or if the user chooses not to download and install an available update.

The internet updater behaves like this:

• If DriveSitter does not establish a successful connection to the download site(s), it retries to do so in 1 hour.
• If DriveSitter successfully connects to the download site(s) and detects that no new version is available at the moment, it schedules the next check in 21 days.
• If DriveSitter detects an update, it asks the user whether the update should be downloaded and installed.
• If the user chooses not to download the update, DriveSitter schedules the next check in 21 days.

If the user chooses to download and install the update, DriveSitter schedules the next check in 21 days only if the download and install was successful. If the download or install was unsuccessful, DriveSitter retries in 1 hour.

You may disable the scheduled internet update in the options manager (CTRL+O), page "Updates" by unchecking "Automatically check for updates". If you disabled schedules updates, it is recommended that you manually check for an update from time to time.

This may occur if you are using a file-based firewall. Each update of DriveSitter may involve an update of the internet updater itself. File-based firewalls usually detect that the internet updater executable changed and requery the user to confirm the permissions of the internet updater.
This is not a bug of DriveSitter. It is a security related issue due to the way the firewall protects your computer. There is no workaround. You need to (re-)assign the internet access permissions for the internet updater every time the internet updater itself was updated.

When DriveSitter detects an update and successfully downloaded it, an interim shortcut will be created on the desktop. This shortcut will automatically be removed after the successful installation of the update. If for whatever reason the download of the update was successful but the installation was not, the shortcut is left on the desktop to enable the user to perform the installation of the downloaded update without downloading it again.
You should double-click on the desktop icon and install the update. If you know that DriveSitter is currently up to date, you may delete the shortcut.

Because the internet updater requires administrative privileges. There is currently no workaround.

Because apart from downloading an update from the internet, the internet updater also starts the installation of the update which then requires administrative privileges to install the software and register the components.

If you have problems viewing the new help file of DriveSitter, you might need to download the HTML Help Update from Microsoft. A direct download link is provided on the download page of DriveSitter.

DriveSitter does not recognize any IDE drives if Norton GoBack is installed. According to Symantec, this problem does occur on Windows XP only, but our beta testers already reported it on Windows 2000.
This is not a bug of DriveSitter!
Symantec has already confirmed this to be a problem and is currently (Note from 03/03/2004) working on a bugfix.
Until Symantec solved this problem or we found a workaround, the only advice is to uninstall GoBack and ask Symantec for a bugfix. We are very sorry!

Just start DriveSitter again. The new instance of DriveSitter will find the first one and directs it to redisplay the main window.

Open the options manager by pressing CTRL+O. Select the removable device in the options tree and check the option "If this device is not present, do not ask to remove this device neither from options nor its data from the stock (since it is a removable device such as an external HDD)".

DriveSitter lists the options of absent devices to let you peek into its settings and copy them if you need them for other or new devices. Nonetheless, DriveSitter can not automatically recognize whether the absent device is only temporarily removed.
To completely remove all data of the absent device from DriveSitter, open the options manager by clicking on the toolbar of the main window. Select the removable device in the options tree and uncheck the option "If this device is not present, do not ask to remove this device neither from options nor its data from the stock (since it is a removable device such as an external HDD)". DriveSitter will ask you whether the stored stock data and/or options of this device should be completely removed.

This is a known issue on some operating systems. The unmount request of Windows is denied by Windows itself, because DriveSitter commands Windows to monitor the mounted volume. To bypass this, you can follow either of the two solutions:

(1) Disable the volume monitoring by unchecking "Auto-update volumes free space" in the "Volumes" menu of the main window. Unmount the volume and check the auto-update again.

(2) Minimize DriveSitter to the system tray or completely hide DriveSitter. Unmount the volume and reshow DriveSitter.

Note that this problem only occurs while the main window of DriveSitter is visible or minimized and not while DriveSitter is in the system tray or completely hidden.

Quit DriveSitter and delete the "options.ini" file from the DriveSitter program directory. All settings will be lost.

This is a known issue about network messages on different Windows platforms. Read more about this in the program help: Action Options - Network Message.

Go to Windows "start" button, "Settings", "Control Panel" and double click on the "Add or Remove Programs" icon. Select DriveSitter from the list and click the "Change/Remove" button.

DriveSitter will completely be removed from the computer.
We would appreciate if you would let us know why you decided to remove DriveSitter.

The high numbers that designates the date and time within exported stock data can be interpreted as seconds since 01/01/1970 ("Unix Timestamp"). To convert it to the correct local time, the time zone and daylight saving shift for the localization must be added.

To convert the date/time values to an Microsoft Excel date or time format, use the following formula assuming that the DriveSitter time value is stored in $A2: "=$A2/86400+DATE(1970;1;1) +tz +dst" (without quotes) where tz is the timezone shift in seconds and dst is the daylight saving shift in seconds.

To convert DriveSitter date/time values to valid Statistica (www.statsoft.com) dates (which represents date/time as days since 01/01/1900 with the fractional part interpreted as the time of the day), use the following formula: (TIME + 25569 * 86400 + tz + dst) / 86400 where tz is the timezone shift in seconds and dst is the daylight saving shift in seconds.

This is a misleading error message from the help system of Windows. It actually arises if the help system of Windows is not up to date and therefore the help file cannot be interpreted. Address to Microsoft for a current version of the interpreters for Windows-help files.

If the bug is still undiscovered up to date, please write down exactly what puts out the error (what exactly happened) what you have done and how the bug can be reproduced. Send this information together with a description of your operating system (+language version, localization) and (as far as possible) the installed software to the technical support. Your email will be answered immediately and you will get informed in case of a bugfix (patch/update).

We apologize for any inconvenience. The help file of DriveSitter and the F.A.Q. is relatively extensive and should answer actually all basic questions in regard to the program (for theoretical questions we must refer to special textbooks). Should you, nevertheless, have a question that is not answered by the program help or the F.A.Q. and own a license, you may direct a question to the technical support (don’t forget to add the name of the licensee and the license number with your email!).

DriveSitter is a commercial, closed-source product; the source code is not public. If you have technical questions regarding the program, please refrain in mutual interest of the cumbersome use of debuggers (this is prohibited by the license agreement) and contact us; maybe we can answer your questions.