How to Repair a Laptop Hard Drive

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Dave Andrews, today I'm going to show you how to repair a laptop hard drive. Now I have my laptop here, and you may be running into issues where you are getting blue screens every now and then, or your computer is basically locking up or shutting itself down. A lot of times this can be due to hard drive problems. Now the very first tip I can give you is when you start to encounter blue screens and lock ups like that, make an immediate backup of all of your files as soon as you can. After you have made your backup I'm going to show you a couple of things we're going to do to troubleshoot this. On your computer click on your start button, and then click on the computer button. On Windows XP it will say my computer. Now what we're going to do is we're going to right click on the C drive, and then go to properties. From there let's click on tools, and then under error checking click the check now button. This is going to tell you that Windows needs your permission to continue, it's a typical Vista thing. You won't get that on XP. Basically what this is going to do is it's going to run a check disk command on our hard drive. And you want to make sure you have it checked to automatically fix file system errors, and we're also going to check this other check box that says scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors. Now what that will do is that will scan every single block on your hard drive that stores data, and if it encounters any problems with that block it will flag it as bad and move on. So your operating system won't use that bad sector anymore, and therefore it won't crash trying to read it. So click start. Now it's about to tell me it can't check my disk while it's in use. Because we're doing this on the C drive, which is where Windows is installed, you have to schedule a check as soon as your computer reboots. So let's click on schedule disk check, and then click okay. And then click the X, and now let's reboot the computer. And basically what is going to happen is as you reboot, when your computer comes back up, you will get your manufacturers logo, and when Windows starts to boot it's going to run a system or file checking utility that's scanning your hard drive for all errors. Let that run through and see if that fixes the problem. My name is Dave Andrews, and I've just told you how to repair a laptop hard drive."