Failing Hard Drive: What Are The Symptoms?

Some time soon, you will fall a victim of a hard drive crash. This is a normal occurrence that happens every now and then. Backing up your data is every brilliant idea such that in case of a data loss you will use it to get back your data. Some of the most common symptoms you start to see before the storage device fails act as an early warning to the owner so that he/she may take the appropriate precautions.

Such warning signs include thins like:

Often freezing of the computer. When this happens, the mouse cursor is unmovable and keyboard input is ignored. Nothing works at this point and the only way to put your machine back to the normal condition is to restart. Other symptoms are frequent lock-up while the machine is booting, File saving or opening simply taking a long time, and sometimes files disappear mysteriously.

Just to try and diagnose your system and save some of your important data, here are some few diagnostic s to try and know if the symptoms displayed above are indeed signify a drive failure:

First, check to ensure the power cable is properly connected to the drive, Check to be sure the data cable is properly connected to the drive, If it is an IDE drive, ensure the ribbon cable is aligned properly, Master or slave assignment is correctly set if this is an IDE drive. If the disk has actually failed or crashed then many times you will actually hear the drive making strange metallic noises this usually is the read/write head thrashing around aimlessly and indicates failure. Also when your system has a crashed storage device, it will not be able to boot you may also get a blue screen of death which has a lot of writings that you might not understand.

Even though this may seem to be the end of every thing and think that you have loosed it all, there is still hope for your data. In case your disk fails and you end up loosing your data all you do is to contact a data recovery specialist to do the job of getting back all your data.

More on symptoms of hard drive failure