How to Determine if your Hard Drive is Close to Failure Hard drives today are becoming more reliable compare to their previous versions. But as reliable as they have become these products are still susceptible to crash someday and still have a limited lifetime. This is one of the reasons why you should back up your files. When you do regular backups of your hard drive you prevent data loss when your hard drive finally fails. It’s better to recognize some symptoms that your hard drive will crash any moment and backing it up before you replace it. Identifying a failing hard drive will save you from any problems that may arise once it decided to fail. Over the past few years, hard drives developments have made it faster and quieter. One of the downside of this advancement is that some of signs that your hard drive is suffering from mechanical defects and failures are hardly to be noticed at all. However there are still signs that will let you know that your hard disk drives are about to fail. 1. Clicking Hard Disk Drive – One of the usual symptoms that a failed hard disk drive usually gives is a clicking sound from your hard disk drive. This can be a sign of a head crash, corrupt firmware on the drive’s ROM chip, an electrical problem like a burned chip, blown heads, a bad PCB controller, overwritten servo’s, damage to the hard drive’s platters and alignment issues from being dropped, jarred or a power surge. When you hear such noise coming from your hard drive its time for you to back up your file and have your hard disk check by a technician. 2. Computer takes long time to boot up - When your computer takes a long time to boot up it means that it is working too hard because of things that it needs to be initialized. Another reason is your hard drive maybe suffering from read/write failures. Your hard drive maybe having a hard time locating the things it needs to boot up because of too much bad sectors of your hard drive. If you just reformatted your system and booting it still takes a long time then you should start backing up your files. 3. Blue Screen of Death - When your system turns into blue screen when you try to boot or even during the middle of an operation, it can signify that your computer operating system has been damaged, hard drive bad sectors that makes the system unable to read important data in your drive, virus or Trojan may have infiltrated your system or simply your hard drive could be failing. 4. CHKDSK shows bad sectors - CHKDSK is a good indicator and a tool to check how much bad sectors your hard disk drive have. If too many bad sectors are showing up during CHKDSK or similar disk test utilities it usually means that your disk drive is going to retire anytime soon. 5. Drive not formatted prompt – This prompt usually means that the hard drive’s partition has been damaged, deleted or corrupted. There are several reasons why it happens. Virus, hard re-boot, power outage or surges, wrong use of disc partitioning utilities some of the reasons why you will end up with a damaged a partition. 6. Too much heat during operation - Overheating can cause not only the hard drive but as well the other components of your computer to fail. Keep in mind that there is certain temperature that your computer can still perform do its task. Too much heat can cause your system to fail and shortens the life span of your computer. 7. Hard Disk Drive’s History - You should know if your hard disk drive have been dropped onto a hard surface, used under too much heat or started to fail before. This is very important especially if you bought your hard drive in a surplus store. When your hard disk drive has this kind of history it is a good candidate for failure. 8. Computer Keeps Re-Booting – One common reason why your computer keeps re-booting over and over is because the boot sector of your hard drive has been hijacked by a virus. Some virus has the ability to create continuous loop to make your computer reboot over and over again. It is programmed to tell your system to go back to the boot sector and re-boot. 9. System Freezes or Hangs – Bad sectors is one of the reason why your system freezes or hangs while it tries to boot or access a file or program. Your system is unable to access the information it needs to open the file or load the program because the code it needed to do such task maybe damaged hence the bad sector. 10. Drive or Device not found – You will usually get a prompt like the drive is not ready or hard drive or device not found, this could mean that the hard drive is in a bad state. Other reason for this problem is BIOS boot priority has been changed, partition structure is damaged or corrupted, or a virus has infiltrated your system. 11. Operating System not found – You will get this message when your computer detects that there are important operating system files that have been damaged or the part where in your partition where your OS is located is damaged or corrupted. It is advisable to start backing up your important files when you experience these kinds of situations. If your computer already failed and can’t open it again then it is safer not to turn on your computer again. Because when you continue to use your computer, you will damage its hard drive more and make recovering your data harder or not at all.
Posted on: Tue, 20 Aug 2013 17:31:54 +0000