Early Detection of Hard Drive Failure
Hard drives keep getting bigger and cheaper – and, unfortunately, also less reliable and more prone to failure. We're seeing more and more failed drives, often quite new ones.
If you can spot a problem early, it may be possible to recover data at a reasonable cost. It's very expensive to get data off a badly damaged drive.
Warning signs
- Frequent freezes.
- Losing files or recently saved parts of files.
- Frequent lock-up during start up.
- Frequent errors (e.g. "file not found") or corrupted files.
- Strange behaviour, sudden new noises.
- Scary noises – scraping, clunking sounds, high-pitched whine.
- Not recognizing the BIOS.
- Alerts from hard drive monitoring systems (Vista provides these).
What to do in a crisis
- Stop everything and call an expert.
- Unless you are technically savvy, don't use automatic backups, disk cleaner uppers etc. They can make things worse.
- Don't allow total strangers at call centres to access your sick hard drive remotely.
- Don't ignore warning signs. For the price and time of a phone call, you could save (or lose) your disk contents.
Prevention
- Buy good quality drives, even if they cost a little more.
- Treat your computer with care. Avoid dust, sticky stuff, dropping it, moving laptops while in use.
- Back up your data regularly.
- Use early-warning disk monitoring software like DiskAlert.
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