Symptoms of a crashed Hard Disk

It has been found out that hard disks, both for PCs and laptops, are crashing at an alarming rate. Some researchers have found out that hard disks are failing every 15 sec. That’s alarming!! This means that your hard disk is no exception. In fact, your hard disk could be failing and yet you don’t know. Here are some signs that show this:

Appearance of many error messages: If you experience many error messages then that is an indication of hard drive crash and if not dealt with will eventually lead to data loss. Some of the errors experienced are: ‘Hard drive not formatted’ or ‘Hard drive not found’, ‘Operating system not found’, ‘Disk drive corrupted’ or ‘Disk failure’, ‘Unknown booting device’. The ‘hard drive not formatted’ error indicates that a hard drive partition has been damaged, deleted or corrupted. The causes of this are mainly viruses, power outages or surges, disk partitioning utilities and in other cases updating of software. When you get a message telling you that the drive is not ready, hard drive or device not found it could mean that the hard disk contains corrupted sectors, the BIOS boot priorities have probably been changed, the partition structure is damaged, or a virus has infected your system.

Click sounds from the hard drive: If you ever note unusual sounds emanating from the hard drive it means that the hard drive is physically damaged and may be experiencing a physical crash. Such sounds indicate corrupt firmware, damage on the hard drive’s magnetic platters, power surges or misalignment on the hard drive after being dropped. Overheating of the hard drive that causes the internal components to expand and to come into contact with each is another way that hard disks may crash. Thus, when the hard disk is running, continuous contacts are made and this is how the click sounds are heard. It may also be caused by a broken actuator arm swaying freely within the drive.

Missing files and folders: This is not noted easily. It is only noticeable when you find out that actually there is some of your information missing i.e. particular files and folders are missing. Some files and folders, both personal and system files, may go missing without the knowledge of the user. Another way you will notice this is when you get error messages informing you that the files and folders you are trying to access are not there, there are some system files missing or when the user is looking for a certain file, he/she finds out it is missing. If such situations occur, it means the hard disk is probably failing and thus one may lose their data.

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