Common Hard Drive Problems

First of all check all the cables are tight, jumpers are in the correct position, its properly formatted and has an OS installed on it and you can see the drive in the post screen. Also please make sure it has a proper Master Boot Record(MBR). Make sure its not corrupted. You can check it with tools like partition magic or chkdsk which originaly come with windows.

1. Most hard drive problems are caused by physical damage. If you hear a ticking sound coming out from your HDD then it means that something has been bent and that there is now physical damage occurring. Do not wait anymore, start backing up your data. Do not reboot, might not run after reboot.

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. S.M.A.R.T (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.

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. It takes hours for the repairing and not 100% guaranteed to success.

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. The only way is 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.

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