Fixing issues with a new hard drive
When I’m doing tech work, many of the computers brought in have problems because of the user not knowing what they are doing or need to do. This leads to viruses and misconfigurations etc. If you don’t count those, over half of the remaining actual hardare problems are hard drive related. Usually this means a hard drive that has gone bad. When that happens, time for a new hard drive and hope you can recover all your data.
With all the hardware in a computer, having the hard drive go out is the worst that can happen. This is the only item that if it goes out you can also lose your data. Isn’t the data what is really important? Word docs, pdf’s, photos, movies, emails, etc. How valuable is that stuff to you?
The funny thing is, most people don’t prepare for a hard drive failure in any way. Let me put it to you, your hard drive will fail it’s just a question of what day. Pick the most inconvenient day, that will be the day.
Over the past couple years, the only problems I’ve really had with my computer have been a hard drive going bad. You can usually tell a hard drive is going bad. With one computer it was the black smoke and the grinding noise coming out of the machine. Luckily that is the exception. Most of the time you can clue in that the hard drive is going bad by these things:
- The computer is slower or seems to take forever to boot
- You are getting lockups regularly that require a reboot.
- Rebooting wants you to run disk check
If you are experiencing these, chances are your hard drive is starting to go bad. But wait, I hear you saying, my hard drive is only a couple years old. Guess what? Doesn’t matter. I’ve seen 3 month old hard drive die. I’ve seen hard drives last for 8 years. Depends on a lot of factors. Unfortunately, not all hard drive models from a single manufacturer are equivalent in reliability so you can’t depend on only getting from 1 manufacturer.
The best thing is to backup. Now, this mostly means your data. Problem is, sometimes data can be in places we don’t think about. What about your Outlook file that has all your email? Or your Quickbooks file of your account for the last 7 years? These can be in many places. The problem is getting it all and backing up in a way that allows you to easily put it back in case of a crash. With drives getting to 300 GB and 400 GB, how do you back it all up? Not to mention, that larger drives seem more unreliable and more prone to crashing.
The other thing is actually reinstalling all of the apps and getting all the updates. This can be a nightmare.
So what to do? Well, I try to keep everything in My Documents that I can. That includes regular backups of the Outlook file and Quickbooks file. Plus any known config and ini files I can ( like my ftp program). Then I have a program that automatically backs up that folder. I also have it set to backup my web server folder with all my projects in it and the mysql folder with all the databases in it. Then if I crash unexpectedly, I can reinstall and get all my data back.
The other thing I do is have a second drive that I ghost to once or twice a week. What is Ghost? It is a commercial program that allows me to completely copy my hard drive to a second hard drive. Then if the first dies I can turn off the machine and boot from the backup as if nothing happened. Maybe then I have to get my updated data off my backup from the night before. This has saved me several times in the past. There are also other programs out there that do the same as ghost.
Why am I writing this? I’ve had some issues lately and then today my system locked up and when I rebooted it couldn’t detect the hard drive. Uh oh. So it is right now cloning over to the second drive. When done I’ll reboot from that second drive and continue on.
Another item that may help some people are the large external hard drive backup units they have now. You set these up and connect through USB. Then with the press of 1 button you are backing up. I haven’t tried one, but they look cool.
December 29th, 2006 at 6:25 am
While working on my HP Pavillion 734n last night, my screen suddenly went blank, and the PC appeared to lose all power.
I unplugged the unit and tried to restart it.
However, when I pushed the button to restart it, the yellow light on the front of the unit stays on for approx 10 seconds, then goes off. The fan appears to be running, but the hard drive doesn’t seem to be kicking in!
Could the hard drive have ‘crashed’ while I was in the middle of working in it?
The computer is about 3 years old and hasnt been moved or exposed to any change in conditions, nor have I changed any sytems / programs, etc. In fact, I had no indication that anything was wrong until it suddenly ‘died’.
Any advice on what I can do to try and re-boot it or save the hard drive ?
Stupid me has all of the kids summer photos on the hard drive that hadn’t bene backed up yet !!!
Thanks in advance !
December 29th, 2006 at 8:45 pm
Hi Bob,
My first thought would actually be a bad power supply. Second would be the fan on the processor went bad and the cpu is overheating. Find a good local computer shop with people you trust and take it in to get looked at.
Stephen
March 28th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
I have a windows 98 computer and I think the Hard drive have gone bad. Whe I turn on the computer it says to insert sytem disk. But before the computer said that it had the blue screen of death. Then I put in a CD that the computer had come with and tryed to format the ram. But errors kept happening. Then thats when the computer start saying please insert the system disk. Now the computer is not useable anymore. Plus it says that every time I turn the computer on.
March 29th, 2007 at 9:16 am
Zack,
First recommendation if possible is just get a new computer. A windows 98 machine is getting old and any work on repairs may not be worth the time and money. Plus, it’s a lot more vulnerable for security reasons.
Yes, sounds like you do have a dead hard drive. My recommendation is find a local computer company that can take the drive out and try to get your stuff off of it. We do that here in Portage and Summit counties. Not sure where you live.