A small guide to common hard drive problems
Every now and then you will encounter hard drive problems. Understanding what provokes and taking the necessary steps can help reduce the gravity of such situations and transform them into a mere nuisance. One of the most common hard drive problems occurs when you computer stops seeing the hard drive itself. The first step you should take is to shut down the computer, unplug all the cables and open the computer case. Most of the time it is a "plumbing" problem as some internal cables are not properly fixed, so with a great deal of patience unplug every connection and plug them again. Take your time and be careful. If this doesn't help try running the IDE auto detect feature from the BIOS setup, this additional step will usually do the trick. Another common problem that might sometimes occur is that after the installation of a new hard drive your computer seems to lock up and give some strange errors. Again it is time to open the case and do some computer surgery. You should check that on every IDE cable one device is set as master and the other one as slave. Some hard drives although set properly will still refuse to work, there is probably a second position for the jumper which should be done in order for that hard drive to work properly. Every hard drive has some sort of guide on the back of it regarding the various jumper positions. The hard drives I am talking of have one extra position besides the Master, Slave and Auto select. It is the Single jumper position and this causes havoc among the general public. Pay attention to this sort of details and you will avoid a lot of problems. The scenarios above assume that the problem encountered is not very serious. Occasionally though hard drives will physically fail and bad sectors will appear on them. This is why backup is so important. If you have any sort of suspicions regarding this subject test them. Put that Scandisk utility to good use and choose to do a thorough scan or a deep scan. If you find bad sectors than you are in trouble. If you can still boot from that device copy all the sensitive data to a more secure location. If you cannot it is time to use some professionals. As a side note you should be aware that in order to recover data from a damage hard drive you will need another hard drive with a double capacity than the first one. If your hard drive has around 40 gigs this will not be a problem, if it has around 200 gigs than you might encounter some difficulties in recovering the data. In some even more unfortunate cases the bad sectors will render the hard drive almost unusable. If your BIOS system detects it, but your operating system does not, you should consider the alternative of a clean boot from a diskette or CD and perform the formatting of the drives from there. If this still doesn't work there is the dreaded option of the low format. You should be aware that this works only on very old BIOS systems and you have a hard drive of more than 139 gigabytes this alternative is not available to you. The low format will bring the hard drive to its out of the assembly line status, with absolutely no partitions or any information stored on it. The only information added by the low format are the flags attached to the bad sectors. After using the FDISK command you might still get a life kick from your hard drive. If low format still doesn't do the trick you can safely throw the hard drive into the garbage can. But of course physical hard drive failures will occur very rare. The most common hard drive problems occur in the moment when someone attempts to create partitions using the FDISK utility. This utility is not exactly the most user friendly tool available and you must be aware that before creating a logical partition drive you must first create a primary partition drive and then the logical drive. For any additional drives you must first create a secondary partition drive and then create the other logical drives. Also you should be aware that once you create a partition with FDISK that partition will still not be usable. You must format it using the Format command from the command prompt. If you are using Windows 98 as your operating system you should keep copies of the .cab files that can be found on the Windows 98 boot CD. This will help you a lot of the times whenever you need to reestablish a corrupted system file. Another common hard drive problem is that sometimes the operating system will report wrong the amount of available free space. A simple Scandisk should clear the mess. Of course these are only a few of the problems that you might encounter along the road. As an advice though, always try to backup your data as often as you can and always assume that it is your fault not the computer's. This will help you solve about 90 percent of the hard drive problems. Always check the connections and always follow your instinct. If you have a suspicion do not hesitate to put it to the test. Hard drives are pretty reliable devices, but even they can fail so never assume that they won't. Think of the worst scenarios possible and you will never be caught by surprise.
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