Warning!
If your PC is experiencing any of the following signs then you should take immediate action. Ether call us to set up a backup of all your essential data or if you feel comfortable doing it yourself, then buy an external hard drive and back it up that way. The more you use your computer at this point the more likely it is your hard drive will fail and you will loose all of your data. A good backup can save you our your company thousands of dollars and lots of stress.
What Is a Hard Drive?
A computer’s hard drive is the central storage within the system and its failure will bring all practical functions to a complete halt. Your hard drive is what stores all of your information like files, folders, documents and pictures.
Signs of failure
Sign 1 – You hear high-pitched whining, loud clicking or grinding noises coming from the drive
A normally operating drive will make a smooth “whirling” sound as is spins up or down. But if a drive has a grinding or clicking sounds (the Read/Write heads scraping too close to the magnetic platters), then your drive is sick and is on the way out.
Sign 2 – You see the infamous “Blue Screen of Death”, repeatedly
BSODs (Blue Screens of Death) are actually called “Stop” errors and they only appear when your Windows system is experiencing severe software or hardware issues. Often BSODs can be cured with a careful “Repair Install” of the Windows operating system or by removal of a bad device driver. But if these software fast fixes don’t seem to stick, then your hard drive is usually on its last legs. You can use a nice BSOD investigation utility, as manual identification of the presented problem description is not an easy task.
Sign 3 – Your computer keeps re-booting on its own
The problem s not very frequent, and in some cases it can be attributed to hardware issues. It might be a dust covered motherboard, and an overheating processor. But, in a vast majority of the cases, it might be due to bad drives.
Sign 4 - The computer locks up during booting
The occasional hanging during the boot process shouldn’t worry you too much but when it happens like every other startup, these could be red flags for a serious problem. If your computer starts up and then stops after the splash screen then most likely you are having problems with your windows boot manager or your hard drive is failing.
Sign 5 – Your system keeps having frequent freezes or hang ups
You are working along just fine, and then suddenly everything comes to a halt. The program freezes up on you. Your mouse and keyboard seem to stop responding. The only solution is to reboot.
Sign 6 - The Missing Files
It happens once awhile, you might delete a file and not know you did it, but if files randomly start turning up missing, start worrying. The next file to go missing might be a core operating system file that will crash you entire computer.
Sign 7 – Error message: hard drive is not formatted
If you get this message starting up your machine, you know you have a long day ahead of you. You may be able to restart and get it to boot into Windows a few more times but this error is a big sign that you drive is very close to death. By the way don’t try to format the drive! You will lose all your data.
Sign 8 – Error message: boot drive or device not found or drive cannot be accessed
Unfortunately, this message happened many times in my troubleshooting career. In most cases I was still able to retrieve the data from the drive, but reviving the drive is a rather complicated task. You can check the CD/DVD trays or the floppy drive to make sure no stray disks are stuck inside. You can also check the BIOS to make sure the system is booting from the hard drive first. If all these tests are no-good and your information is important to you, then you should contact us immediately.
Sign 9 – Errors: Operating system not found or Missing Operating System
This is a bad one. Even the Microsoft technical support knowledge-base has only got a few causes for this error message. Basically your PC can no longer detect the hard drive or the drive is too severely damaged to read (DOA).
Sign 10 - Accessing, opening, or saving files are taking awfully slow.
It’s like your computer has aged 100 years and accessing even small document files are too much for it. Do not panic, check first if your Hard Drive is full. We always recommend our clients to keep their Hard Drive's at no more than 70% of its capacity. It is definitely a suggestion on the safe side. Its always better to be safe than sorry.
What to do if your drive has any of these symptoms:
1) If you can't afford to loose your data then please call us or take it to a professional.
2) BACKUP YOUR FILES NOW!
3) Create a boot disk and run Windows Scandisk and set it to automatically fix errors. If it finds more than a few bad sectors then you know its pretty bad.
4) If possible download and use a hard drive diagnostic program. All the major hard drive manufacturers have free utilities on their websites.
Kris Wiedbusch
Owner & Founder
Star Tech IT Solutions
