What to Do When You Think Your Hard Drive is Failing
Some symptoms and signs that your hard drive is about to Fail
Signs have been there for a while for me but I have been in denial. Not too many tedious computer jobs that installing apps to a new hard drive. It can be quite cleansing to start anew but for the most part I hate it/ I have been building and upgrading computers since buildings computers since 1996.
My last favourite tasks have always been backing up and then formatting a drive or installing onto a clean drive. blech.
So some symptoms that something was amuck:
Anytime you cannot check your disk for errors it is not good. It means you a corrupted section on the drive that is most likely beyond repair.
I haven’t been about to run a virus scan for about 6 weeks without getting a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) and horrible warnings about your kernels being stacked.
The whenever I connected my camera I got same error and blue screen.
Symptoms Your hard Drive IS failing Or About To Fail
-A noisy or loud hard drive is an about to fail hard drive. Any kind of clicking or whiny metal on metal sound is NOT good. – Your computer is slow and you are sure it is not spyware or other malware/virus or running to many program at once.
If this happens you should try and runs a dskchk, your compter will scan itself for errors and try to repair errors.
This is how I do in Windows XP.
You can force it to check for errors by going to to Start—>Run and type in command prompt: cmd then type chkdsk and run.
You will then have to type in ( you won;t be able to copy in paste) chkdsk volume:/f then enter . It will ask you “Would you like to schedule this volume to be checked the next time the system restarts? (Y/N)” type Y . When you reboot it will repair errors.
To get it to scan and locate problems then repair type in chkdsk volume:/r instead.
If your computer freezes or hangs during process try doing a couple of times. Also try defragging the drive. before yuo scan for errors.
If you are unable to complete a chk dsk then your drive is most likely about to fail . You need to back up your stuff.
What to do: back up you stuff. I like Acronis True Image for Home . It will take an image of my drive and I don’t have to reinstall everything.
Some external drives come with software to take image for you. I HIGHLY recommend you copy onto an external drive if you think your drive is going to crash OR better yet on a fresh install of everything or when your PC is working in top notch condition take image and copy onto eternal drive, then put away until you need it.
I foolishly copied image onto a partition on another physical drive and it got eaten by virus a couple of years ago.
If the worst has happened and your drive has all ready failed and you can’t access your drive in any way- you can try a couple of things.
Add another new hard drive and use the damaged drive as slave to try and recovery old data. In the past I have have some success with a completely unattainable drive but putting in the freezer (!) over night – put it in ziplock bag) hook up drive and copy over as much as possible while you have access/
More info or Buy Acronis True Image Home
If you’re trying to resuscitate a dead hard drive I heartily recommend a program called HDD Regenerator, I’ve lost count of how many hard drives it’s brought back from the dead for me.