How to know if your hard drive is fried
Hard drives fail for any number of reasons. Generally it is due to a mechanical, electrical or data corruption failures.
Without going into deep analysis of what could be the problem here are a few tips to quickly determine if you have a deceased hard drive.
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Instructions
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Tips & Warnings
its always smart to store data on a separate hard drive than your operating system. Not only does it speed up your pc but it segments functions that help you manage the health of your pc.
Always back up your data. Trust me on this one
You can always replace parts real fast, its just the input and data you can't rebuild quickly.
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Comments
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Sidhartha
Nov 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.
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Kristina Jensen
Nov 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...
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Sidhartha
Oct 29, 2008
I'm not a mac guy even though I own an iphone 3g. I don't think you can replace them on mac laptops becasue they used solid state hard drives for some of the newer laptops, thats how they make them so thin. in addition the hard drives are probably integrated with the motherboard to save space. For pc's who knows I haven't opened up a mac pc to even begin, however I did open up my ipod and found its a regular old sata drive that you would find in any laptop.. I hope that helps.
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ahockey
Oct 29, 2008
if so how would you replace it on a imac powerpc(ppc)
