Hard Drive Problems

If the hard drive has not failed yet there are signs that it may
be going down for the count.
You can troubleshoot hard drive problems and in most
cases
fix them. There are certain conditions where the only thing you
can do is invest in a new hard drive.

You may have been lucky enough to have received an error
message, warning you of the imminent demise of your hard
disk drive and you can at least back up your data. You can find
information on backing up your data here.

Blue Screen of Death

If you get a lot of BSOD errors on startup it could mean that your operating system is defective. Bad
sectors on your hard drive may contain system information but your computer may be unable to read
them. You can find help with a Blue
Screen of Death error here. Hard drive problems such
as this can be repaired and might not be fatal to your
computer.

Hang ups and System Freezing

Bad sectors on the hard drive may cause your
system to freeze or hang when accessing an
application or file. Your computer will not be
able to access information for the file or
application on will subsequently freeze. You
can troubleshoot for this kind of error by
running chkdsk. You can also use chkdsk to
attempt to repair these bad sectors. If bad sectors
cannot be repaired you should consider these kinds
of hard drive problems as drastic. At this point you
should back up all the files that you are able to and
consider buying a new hard drive.

"Drive Not Formatted" Error

When a "drive not formatted" or drive not recognized" error occurs it usually points to a damaged
hard drive partition, a deleted partition or a corrupt one. Various practices can delete or corrupt a
partition, these include, hard reboots, power outages and viruses. You should try to repair the disk
using chkdsk or the windows repair utility for these hard drive problems.

Computer Reboots in an Endless Cycle

Somehow I don't think this has anything to do with Da Vinci's musings on perpetual motion.

A computer may reboot again and again when the boot sector has become corrupted or hijacked
by a virus. However, before going to drastic measures, try swapping in new ram first. One PC I
had to fix displayed all kinds of errors including the looping reboot failure, in the end it was
found to be a bad ram stick. Some errors that point to the hard disk are easy fixes and not hard
drive problems at all.

Clicking Sound from the Hard Drive

Hard drive problems like a clicking disk drive can
indicate head crash (the head is the reader that skims
a fraction of an inch above the platters), damage to the
hard drive's platters and alignment issues from being
dropped, jostled or a power surge.
When the sound becomes a grinding noise this
may indicate that the head is resting on the
platter and destroying your data bit by bit. Think
of a needle skimming across the surface of a
vinyl record. We're all old enough to remember
that right? Right? Damn, I'm old!

There is no repair for these kinds of hard drive problems.
The most you can hope for, if you do not back up your files, is to save some of the information on
your system before it fails completely.

I've heard of two different ways to help alleviate this condition long enough to access the drive and
remove data. I have to say that I have not tried either method so I cannot condone or
dispel the notion of each.

* Turn the hard drive upside down. This is supposed to be
gravity at work causing the head and arm to "fall" away enough
to be able to read data.

* Removing the hard drive from the system and place it in a
Ziploc bag in the freezer for at least an hour, and then
restoring it to your computer. This is physics at work. The reader
arm is supposed to contract with the cold, moving far enough away
from the platters to be able to read the data.

Like I said I cannot condone the practices I just mentioned. If you want to research such exercises I
would only do so if you cannot retrieve data from the hard drive any other way.

Vanishing Files and Folders

If you know for a fact that you have not relegated files to the Recycle Bin and you no one else has
access to your system it may be that your precious missing files are now the inhabitants of a bad disk
sector.
This may or may not be a tragedy depending on whether or not you back up all your personal files.