Hard Drive failure – Watch out for this!

The following are common ways that indicate that you hard drive is failing:

Blue Screen of Death: It is also possible that when using your computer a blue screen with a lot of information written on it appears. If this happens quite often, it may mean that the operating system has been damaged, existence of bad sectors on the hard drive making the system unable to read them, the hard drive could be failing, infection by viruses, some critical system files are missing or the file structure may have been damaged. This blue screen is usually a recovery tool but is also warning that the hard drive is failing.

Freezing and Hanging: You could be using your computer when all of a sudden, it freezes or hangs i.e. it refuses to perform any operation, even the mouse fails to navigate on the screen. Freezing/ hanging of the system indicates that there are some bad sectors on the hard drive and the system is unable to access information it needs to open the file or to load a particular program. This can be caused by overloading of the system memory, corrupt files or having shared programs with conflicting procedural calls. The system is unable to get the correct information for carrying out certain processes.

Rebooting: Rebooting means that the computer keeps restarting on its own. The main cause of this is a virus. The virus infects the system booting files within the hard drive and creates a continuous loop. This loop tells the system to keep going back to the booting files and reboot i.e. when the booting files are executed by the system, it makes the cycle repeat itself when a certain point is reached and this is why the computer keeps rebooting.

Noisy sounds from the hard drive: Clicking, noisy whirring and buzzing sounds emanating from the hard drive indicate a head crash, corrupt firmware on the ROM chip, electrical problem, damaged hard drive platters, broken actuator arm or internal components of a hard drive have expanded due to overheating and are probably in contact with each other. At such a point either try and backup as much information as possible or call a data recovery expert to recover as much data as possible because problems of the hard drive lead to data loss.

More information about hard drive failure follow the link.

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