Hard Disk Failure & Troubleshooting

Hard drive failures are a fact of life that's why there are RAID arrays, backup systems and an entire infrastructure designed to prevent data loss and minimize the impact to an organization when drives stop working. But that doesn't mean you can't do anything to minimize hard drive failure. Google's landmark research document, "Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population," published in 2007, provided a huge amount of information about consumer-grade SATA and PATA drives used in the company's servers. Much of this remains relevant when formulating disk drive failure reduction strategies today

Today hard drive failure which are also referred to as hard drive crash or hard disk crash is a number one cause of data loss and biggest computer problem one can face. It occurs when you cannot access the information on your hard drive because it is not functioning properly any longer for some reason, while your computer is correctly configured. There are 2 types of hard drive failure: logical and physical.

In case of logical failure, you cannot access your data because data structure on the disk is damaged. It can happen as a result of an accidental deletion of important system files, partitions/volumes, accidental hard drive formatting or deletion of hard drive, application conflicts, operating system corruption or virus attack) But the mechanically the hard drive is intact and working properly. Often, the drive still gets recognized by the BIOS, but would not boot. In this case, quality hard drive recovery software can resolve the problem.

For the physical hard drive failure meanwhile, if you’ve had a mechanical or electrical hard drive failure, recovery software won’t help. Only data / file recovery experts can retrieve back the information and even repair the hard drive. However, for all cases of data loss there are certain actions you should avoid to maximize chances of data file recovery. Physical hard drive failure is unavoidable, sooner or later. As a rule, hard drives either crash at the beginning of their life or may last for years. However, mechanical hard drive failure is something you can expect at any moment, especially if the warranty period is over. Also, there are typical warning signs that inform you with a high degree of probability about the upcoming hard drive failure. They require immediate reaction.

1.0              Hard Disk Failure Symptom

Clicking Hard Drive

A clicking hard drive can indicate 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.

System Blue Screens

When your system blue screens when you try to boot or during the middle of an operation, it can mean the operating system has been damaged, there may be bad sectors on your hard drive that the system is unable to read, your hard drive could be failing, you might have a virus or trojan, someone may have deleted critical dll's or system files, the partition or file structure may have become corrupted or damaged.

Drive Not Formatted

A drive not formatted error usually indicates the hard drive's partition has been damaged, deleted or corrupted. It can be caused by a virus, a hard re-boot, a power outage or surge, disc partitioning utilities and sometimes updating software, anti-virus programs or simply installing new software can damage a partition.

Computer Keeps Re-Booting

The most common reason a computer keeps re-booting over and over is because the boot sector has been hijacked by a virus that creates a continuous loop. It keeps telling the system to go back to the boot sector and re-boot.

System Freezes or Hangs

When your system freezes or hangs while trying to boot or while accessing a file or programs it usually indicates that there are bad sectors on the hard drive and the system is unable to access the information it needs to open the file or load the program. It can be caused by a corrupt file or shared program files that have conflicting call procedures or too many system resources are being used (the system memory gets full or overloaded).

Drive or Device Not Found

When you get a message telling you the drive is not ready, hard drive or device not found it could mean the hard drive is bad, the boot priority in bios has been changed, the partition structure is damaged, or a virus has infected your system.

Operating System Not Found

An operating system not found message typically means that the operating system files are damaged, the boot device priority has been changed, the partition table is damaged or the hard drive has been formatted.

Lockups

Many times a hard drive will show early signs that problems are occurring. These can include a computer that locks up frequently. If a sector on a hard drive is bad, it may not be able to be read by the operating system. This can cause the operating system to crash or just display an error message appears on the screen.

Data Loss

A symptom of a hard drive problem is files that are located in a folder or the desktop that seem to disappear. This is a form of data loss that can occur when a hard drive is developing problems. This happens when sectors on the hard drive go bad where a particular file happens to reside.

Errors

An error message that appears when the hard drive cannot be found is a symptom that there is a problem with the hard drive or at least the connection. A cable that it not fully connected to either the hard drive or the motherboard can cause the system to have problems reading the hard drive. If a new hardware device was recently installed, it is possible the cable that connects the hard drive came loose.

Performance

Slow drive access is a symptom that something may be going wrong with the hard drive. Slow drive access can include excessive hard drive usage when attempting to open or save a file. When the performance of the computer system appears to significantly decrease, the hard drive should be checked for problems. 

How to Diagnose & Fix Hard Drive Problems

It's a good idea to use ScanDisk about once a month to check your hard drive to keep your system running well. ScanDisk can find and fix errors in the file allocation table, the file system structure lost clusters, crosslinked files and the directory tree structure. It can also detect and isolate sectors that have gone bad because of damage to the surface of your disk.

You should also defragment your hard drive on a regular basis to keep your system running well. In the course of normal usage, files are constantly changed and written or rewritten to the hard drive. The file system tries to pack the files tightly, but because they are not all the same size, it breaks them into pieces to fit where it finds space for them. Over time these pieces get scattered all over the drive. It begins to take a lot of head movement (and thus time) to read and write files. As a result, your computer's performance suffers, and worse yet, it's easier for errors to creep in. You might want to use Disk Cleanup to clean out the junk.

Check for Errors by Running ScanDisk  

Through normal use of your computer, your hard disk can become cluttered and a bit messy. Folders become cross-linked, file names contain invalid or unknown characters or become damaged, and file names become disassociated with their files. ScanDisk can fix these and other problems for you.