Things You'll Need:
- a good ear and nose
- a spare pc
- a willingness to investigate.
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Step 1
Listen to your hard drive. If you hear clicking or whizzing sounds chances are a moving piece is either broken or out of place a classic sign of a mechanical problem.
If you have a spare pc take the hard drive out of that pc and swap it with the broken one to confirm. -
Step 2
Hard drives fail due to electrical failures too. If you don't hear your hard drive spinning when you turn it on or can't get it to recognize the disk or load your Operating system, most likely its an electrical problem.
Electrical failures are recoverable however they are pricey. Depending on how important the data is you can google search data recovery and almost a million companies that specialize in it. -
Step 3
Firmware corruption is another type of hard drive problem. Firmware is an embedded chip within the hard drive case containing codes for controlling the disk. If the instructions within the firmware become damaged or corrupt, the drive will fail.
Usually you will hear a spinning disk when the PC is turned on followed by a non-recognized disk or a system hang during boot up. -
Step 4
Last but not least my favorite type of hard drive failure is a logical hard drive failure. LOL
These are truly a pain because the hard drive is physically fine however its the information that you have to track down that is causing the problem. We all know logical errors because they cause disk errors, slow performance, strange computer errors and file corruption.
Usually when you have inherited an virus or worm or Trojan this is where they hide in the logical hard drive failure. Unless the data is super important don't even waste your time.
Comments
anielsen said
on 11/26/2009 ok if i believe the prob. is Firmware corruption or logic, how do i fix it. it's like chicken & egg b/c i need the drive to function to reinstall anything. disk drive, mouse, webcam, and USB ports in general all ceased working. shortly thereafter i discovered a worm in my email. is there a sys cleanse i need or do i have to boot from disk (2nd time in 2 months!)
Thanks for any help. i admit i'm clueless w/ technology.
lbug said
on 7/10/2009 My son was playing on the computer when the power went out. I wasn't home but I was told that when the computer rebooted and started it asked him to go into safe mode. He chose to. He said it never loaded. When I try to load the computer it cycles from the start up to that screen requesting me to choose safe mode or to start the computer normally. Either way I chose the computer can not load it just starts the cycle over again after a list is shown with drive extensions. On the start up screen before if switches I notice that it displays no drivers. I also received the message that one of the test the computer performed failed. Does this mean my driver is fried and if this is the case how can i fix it?
evbaw2 said
on 3/13/2009 Sidhartha, thanks for the article. 5*s! I also recommended you.
Sidhartha said
on 11/18/2008 kklode,
When hard drives are configured they are put into partitioned into logical sectors using a file system such as FAT or NTFS (file allocation table)(network file system) These file systems help the pc find things in your hard drive. They also call this a logical drive. Which is represented as a letter such as an H drive or and C drive etc.
When your pc says it failed its logic test it means that one of tables in the file are corrupted and the pc can not read the logical drive. hence the reason for the failed logic test.
kkolode said
on 11/17/2008 Aha! My hard drive--the one I had to replace twice on my laptop--failed to pass its logic test!!! It never was very logical...now it all makes a strange kind of sense...