hard drive troubleshooting

hard drive troubleshooting

Hard drive is another very essential component of a computer where data are stored permanently. Data include photo, video, document, email and so on. Most of the components in your computer are electronic devices. They do not fail with time like a mechanical device such as a car. But the hard drive  is one of the few mechanical devices used in modern computer system.

Main Reasons for Hard Drive Failure:

• The adapter (that is, the SATA, IDE, or SCSI interface) is bad.

• The disk is bad.

• The adapter and disk are connected incorrectly.

The first and last reasons are easy to identify, because in either case the symptom will be obvious: the drive will stop working. You will not be able to get the computer to communicate with the disk drive.

However, if the problem is a bad disk drive, the symptoms are not very clear. As long as the POST routines can communicate with the disk drive, they are usually considered to be good. But the POST routines may not identify problems related to storing information. Even with good POST diagnosis result, you may find that you are allowed to save information to a bad disk. The problem arises when you try to read it back, it gets errors. For the same reason, the computer may not boot as quickly as expected since it can not read the boot information successfully each time the computer reboots.

Symptoms of Hard Drive Failure:

Loud clicking or scratching noises: These sounds are typically caused by physical malfunction within the drive itself. If it happens the first step should be to back up the data as soon as possible. 

Slow performance or read/write failures: These symptoms indicate a failing hard drive. They can also be the result of the fact that the hard drive is almost full, it has not space left for further data storing. Normally for performance hard drive more information within the drive specially the temporary files. But when the drive do not have enough free space (i.e. at least 10%), its overall performance goes down rapidly.

The most obvious solution is to remove files to free up more space. Also defragmention of the drive should improve the condition. If the problem persists you should format the hard drive and reinstall the operating system. Finally if the problem is not solved it is the time to go for a new hard drive.

Boot problems: This could be any of a number of problems as follows:

– A complete failure to boot.

– The hard drive not being recognized by the BIOS.

– The operating system is not found or recognized.

Failure of boot because of any of these reasons means a dead hard drive.

Finally, if the system boots normally but it can not locate the operating system, the most likely problem with the Master Boot Record (MBR).

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