Indications of a Failing Hard Drive

This is a guest post, authored by Lord Chance @ PCHelpForum. Thanks!

Are you having trouble with your computer? Is it slow when booting up? Does your PC fail to boot at all? How about the dreaded Blue Screen of Death? They all may indicate a dying hard drive. These problems may indicate other problems but they can also point to a failing hard drive.

Hard drives are interesting devices. These small packages have two or three platters which hold your data. These platters spin at a high rate of speed and floating back and forth across these platters are the read/write heads. These heads are tiny and delicate. All of the reading and writing happens in milliseconds. Put all of this speed together with heat and vibration you get a recipe for disaster. Now that I have given a bit of background, I can now move on to what are the indicators of a failing hard drive.

First as I mentioned, Slow Booting, Failing to bootor BSODscan indicate hard drive problems. If the platters media becomes weak or damaged, this results in increased read time or failure to read situations. If the damage is in the MBR(Master Boot Record) then your PC will fail to boot. Also if the read/write heads have to read the data multiple time, this will cause your PC to slow down.


What should I do now? How can I tell? In this case there is no real tried and true test but there are some things you can do to help diagnose a failing drive. Hard drives have a feature called Smart Drive. What this does is selftest the hard drive and look for trouble. Not very accurate in my opinion but it is better than guess work. For more information on SMART Monitoring you can go to Wikipedia's Comparison of S.M.A.R.T. tools. Also when you buy a PC you will get a disk of utilities that will contain some kind of monitoring software. (DELL, HP, Western Digital, Maxtor and Seagate to name a few.). Or here are some Freeware Utilities to help monitor your hard Drives.

• PassMark DiskCheckup™
  
• Active@ Hard Disk Monitor
  
• HDDScan
  

You can also run CHKDSK on your hard drive paying close attention to how many errors it finds. How many errors it fixed. Then run the utility again. If the number or errors continues to grow then it is time to backup your data and find another hard drive.

Other signs of a failing hard drive is a noisy drive and the drive light stays on continualy. If the hard drive makes a squeeling noise or a grinding noise then the drive is on the way out. BACKUP YOUR DATA! If the drive light stays on then if possible back up your data. The light staying on may indicate a fault in the drive electronics. Whatever the fault. One of the best sources of information on your hard drive is the Manufacturer's Web Site. You can also find lots of info at DATACENT.COM.

Failure of a hard drive can be devastating but with care and proper backups of your data this failure will turn into just an inconvenience. I hope this tutorial helps you to be ready for such an event.

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