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Common Hard Drive Problems
By Robert | March 31, 2007
First check all cables are tight, jumpers are in the correct position, its formatted and has an OS installed on it (in the case of the boot drive) and you can see the drive in the post screen.
1. Many hard drive problems are caused by physical damage. If you hear a tic tic tic sound coming from the HDD then it means that something has been bent and that there is now physical damage occurring. Backup NOW Do not reboot, start getting some form of back up happening as soon as possible.
2. Hard drives don’t usually die without some forewarning. Freezes, reboots, error messages, etc usually indicate that you have a problem and need to start troubleshooting to find out what it is.
3. Software from your HDD Manufacturer can assist in a big way. SMART (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) is available as a free download from the HDD’s manufactures websites and should be run to find out what errors are present. If you have to return a dud hard drive then print a copy of the smart report and include it with the hard drive.
4. If you don’t want to use the tools shown above then you can always get into the command prompt and use a DOS based command chkdsk /c (where c is the drive you want to check). CHKDSK will run a quick test to see if it can detect any bad sectors and will then show a summary of the tests conducted and the results. Me i’m too old to play with DOS any more and prefer the GUI versions instead.
While in CHKDSK you may be able to repair a bad sector in actual fact you are not repairing it but telling the file allocation table to ignore the bad sector and not to save any information on it. I have successfully repaired 1397 dud/bad sectors out of 1500+ bad sectors on a 40Gb hard Drive that allowed me enough time to recover 90% of the clients data using a combination of CHKDSK and GetDataBack.
It doesn’t always work and can take hours to complete the “Repairs”.
5. When in doubt use google to download free apps and tools to do a deeper check.
6. There is no magic cure for a failing hard drive. Backup backup backup.
7. If all else fails contact the supplier and see if they have a repair option or a repair agency they can send it to. Usually this means sending it overseas to somewhere like Malaysia and can take upwards of a couple of months to get it back.
DO NOT DO THE FOLLOWING
8. Placing hard drives in plastic bags and freezing them may sometimes work but I don’t recommend it.
9. Bashing them on a table top may free up a stuck read/write head but it will certainly also stuff up the hard drive.
10. Disassemble the hard drive and attempting to repair the problem yourself. The instant the platters are exposed to unfiltered air they will start to corrode especially if you touch them with your bare fingers.
11. The read write heads are meant to float above the platters at some ridiculously small distance so if you touch the read/write head you have just completely screwed it.
12. If all else fails and drive is unrecoverable then rip it apart to see how it works, marvel at the strength of the magnets that control the read/write heads and then throw it away.
Common Hard Drive Problems - Software
Hard drive software problems are common. The most common being a virus totally corrupting all data and programs on the hard drive.
But because you are a smarter than the average mud crab you have an Antivirus program in place, Spyware removal programs, Ghost or some other image of your drive and have extensively backed up every day so a minor problem like a corrupted hard drive wont worry you at all.
Then fdisk is your friend. Both flavours of XP, Windows 2000 and ME have a form of fdisk built into them. For the others then click on ubcd.sourceforge.net and download the Ultimate Boot CD.
In Conclusion
When in doubt do not turn off your PC until you have done as much as possible to recover your data.
You may be able to replace the circuit board if it’s burnt out with one from the SAME model and capacity hard drive that you have.
There are any number of freeware and expensive programs that you can use to recover data from a non booting hard drive. If the hard drive is detected and is working in the post screen then you have a reasonable chance of recovering some or almost all of your data.
Topics: TroubleShooting |
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