- [Dave] Hard drive failure isn't just a possibility,
it's an eventuality.
It will happen at some point.
Hard drives typically have warranties
that range from one to five years.
So you'll be troubleshooting for sure.
We try to limit the amount
of hard drive troubleshooting we do
by way of prevention, fault tolerance, and backups,
but it's inevitable.
Troubleshooting will occur at some point.
So ask not if, ask when!
You might not open up an actual hard drive,
like in this image,
but there are some troubleshooting techniques
you can include in your daily work.
Now, your BIOS or your UEFI might not recognize your drive.
This could be for several reasons.
If it is an SATA drive,
first check the power and data connections.
Make sure they are firmly connected and oriented properly.
If a cable was installed improperly,
consider replacing the cable
as it might have a damaged end.
If the drive is an M.2 or PCI Express drive,
make sure that it is firmly seated in the slot
and consider cleaning the slot with compressed air.
Also, check for motherboard BIOS updates.
It might be that the drive is simply too new
to be recognized, especially by older systems.
Also, some drives have their own firmware
that need to be updated as well.
This is the case with PCI Express based NVMe drives.
They might not work properly or at all
without those updates.
So be ready for the hard drive firmware update
and, of course, the BIOS update.
And remember to check the BIOS boot order,
also known as the boot priority.
It might be that you expect to boot
to a specific hard drive,
but the BIOS is configured to boot to removable media
or something else first.
While the BIOS actually sees the drive
in this scenario,
you might think that it failed to do so.
So always check that BIOS boot order
and make sure that the hard drive is first.
Let's take a look at a system now
and view its physical connections and the BIOS boot order.
When you can't boot to the hard drive,
this could be broken down into two categories,
the hardware, and also the software/firmware.
So you need to check both.
If you feel you need to,
you can go inside the computer
and check the actual connections.
Now, here we have a connected hard drive
and you can see the wires in the bottom here.
You wanna make sure that both connections are secure.
So here we have the power connection
and the data connection.
You wanna make sure that those are properly connected
on the hard drive,
make sure they're secure,
and then check the motherboard as well.
Check that SATA connection,
that's for the data.
And then also check the power connection leading
to the power supply.
Check that rail that is powering that hard drive.
Make sure that that is secure as well.
Now on the firmware side, you wanna make sure
that the drive has been recognized
and then you wanna check the boot priority
or the boot sequence as shown here.
So you wanna check both of those things in the firmware.
If the drive won't boot,
you won't be able to get into the software.
So you're not gonna be able to check it there,
but that firmware is really important.
You gotta check that UEFI or BIOS
and see if the hard drive is one, recognized
and two, bootable.
And is it listed in the proper place in the boot priority?
So always check the hardware connections
and the firmware connections as well.
Okay, so remember, check the hard drive connections
and also check that boot order.
Set that hard drive first
in the boot order
for functionality and for security.
Now, another issue.
Windows might not see a drive or perhaps a secondary drive,
and there are several reasons why Windows might not see
that secondary drive.
Maybe a driver needs to be installed for the drive
or a driver for its controller.
This is more common
with newer hard drive technologies,
perhaps knows perhaps the secondary drive needs
to be initialized within disk management,
or it could be that the drive was not partitioned
or formatted.
Let's discuss a few more troubleshooting ticket items.
If the system runs slow,
it can be because the drive has become fragmented
or has been infected with a virus or spyware.
Analyze and defragment the drive.
If it's heavily fragmented, the drive can take longer
to access the data needed,
resulting in slow reaction time.
You might be amazed at the difference in performance
after a defrag.
If you think the drive might be infected,
then scan the disk with your anti-malware program
to quarantine any possible threats.
Missing files at startup can be a real problem.
If you get a message such as boot manager is missing
or something similar,
then the file will need to be written back
to the hard drive.
I discussed this more in the Windows videos.
In severe cases, when you get messages such as this,
it could mean that the drive is physically damaged
and needs to be replaced.
Missing or corrupted files could be the result
of hard drive failure, operating system failure,
malware infection, user error, and other things as well.
If this happens once, it's not really a big deal,
but if it happens more than once,
be sure to back up the rest of the data on the drive
and then use the preventative methods mentioned previously,
especially defragmenting and scanning for malware.
You can also analyze the drive's S.M.A.R.T. data,
and S.M.A.R.T. stands for self-monitoring, analysis
and reporting technology.
It's a monitoring system included
with almost all hard drives that creates reporting data
which when enabled in the BIOS
can be accessed within the operating system.
And we'll show this
in another video a little bit more as well.
Now, if your SATA magnetic disk drive starts getting noisy,
this is magnetic drives,
if it starts getting noisy,
then it's a sure sign of impending drive failure.
You might also hear a scratching or a grading sound
or the drive might intermittently just stop or lock up
with one or more audible clicks.
You can't wait in these situations.
You need to take action right away,
and you need to connect the drive
to another computer immediately
and copy the data to a good drive.
Even then it might be too late.
However, there are some good third-party programs available
that might help recover the data.
And let's discuss some preventive maintenance.
Troubleshooting is great,
but there's that phrase that we say a lot,
an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Just a little bit of prevention
can stop a lot of the problems that you might see.
And so let's take a look at some of these possibilities.
First, clean up the disk.
Well, clean up all the temp files
and all the stuff that's on there periodically
to help it keep it healthy.
And we'll show a couple programs to do that with
in just a bit.
Defragment the disk.
As you write data to a drive,
that data is written in a contiguous fashion,
especially for magnetic drives.
And when you start deleting some of that data,
it causes gaps.
And then the gaps start to get filled in
and it starts to get fragmented over time.
So you wanna defragment the disk
and we'll show that as well in these videos.
Leave at least 10% free.
And this is true for magnetic drives such as this
and also solid state drives.
Leave 10% free so you have that buffer space.
When you fill up an entire drive,
it reduces the lifespan of the drive quickly.
Make sure that high performance drives have good air flow.
So we're talking about M.2 drives
and PCI Express based drives,
'cause they create a lot of heat.
So we wanna make sure we have good air flow
to keep those cool
so they don't get damaged over time.
Scan the drive periodically with your antivirus software,
your anti-malware suite, your end point protection platform,
whatever it is that you're using.
And set the drives to sleep or turn off the computer.
If you set the drives to sleep after X amount of time,
you're automatically turning those drives off.
Especially for magnetic drives,
you're parking them
so that they're not being used when not necessary.
So set them to sleep after 15 minutes
or whatever is good for the user in question
and that'll help to increase the lifespan of the drive.
Let's begin another hands-on demonstration here.
And we'll briefly show how to get to a couple of utilities
in Windows.
And we'll start with disk cleanup.
Now, disk cleanup can be accessed
from the search option within Windows,
or you can go to Start
and let's say in Windows 10,
you can go to Start and then Windows Administrative Tools,
or you can go to your Run prompt
and open it from here
by typing cleanmgr.exe,
cleanmgr.exe.
And when we run that, it gives you a drive selection.
It says, select what drive you want to clean up.
So I've got my, the first disk
or the first drive I should say.
It has two volumes, C and E.
And then the other drive, the M.2 has one volume, the G.
So we could select one and click OK.
And that'll give us some options here.
What do you wanna clean up?
You can clean up regular temporary files.
You could also include the recycle bin.
In this case, this volume doesn't have anything
in the recycle bin,
and you can clean up system files as well.
So definitely use the disk cleanup program.
You can also set this in the task scheduler
to run periodically automatically.
There's third party programs as well. For example, Ccleaner.
And this will remove temporary files from Microsoft Edge,
Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Firefox, Windows Explorer,
and a variety of other places, right?
And it'll get rid of that information immediately.
And it'll tell you it has to close Windows
and stuff like that.
I'm not gonna do that right now
'cause I need everything open.
But even with that, we got rid of 12 megabytes.
On a daily basis,
I'll get rid of 500, 600 megabytes, a gigabyte of data
when I really haven't even done much of anything.
So CCleaner.
And there's a lot of other free options out there as well
that you can download.
Then, of course, we want to do disk defragmenting
to make sure that the files become more contiguous
and we don't have gaps
and we don't have breaks in the files.
And make sure that our drive is not too fragmented.
And so there's a couple ways we can do this.
We can do this with the disk defragmenter program,
and you can search for that.
Or, once again, you can go to Start
and Windows Administrative Tools
or we can go to Run prompt.
And for this one, you can type in dfrgui.exe,
dfrgui.exe.
And that brings up the Optimize Drives window in Windows 10.
They called disk defragmenter in older versions of Windows.
And you can see, I have this scheduled to run.
I believe it's every month.
And last run was on January 2nd.
And so it said it was OK.
And so we could do that for each of our drives here,
and we can analyze those drives and optimize if necessary
and we can change those settings for the timing of it.
So we've use this program to make the files go
in a more contiguous fashion, in a linear fashion,
so they're not broken up and fragmented,
and it can kind of take everything
and put it in a nice order,
which can really help
to make your drive run more efficiently.
So definitely use the optimized drives
or disk defragmenter option.
And that's the GUI version.
You can also do this in the command line
with the defrag command.
And if you look at the defrag command,
you'll see there's lots of parameters for this,
but generally, what you would do is you would type defrag
and select the volume that you want to defragment,
for example, E:.
Now, let's say you had less than 15% free space.
We don't wanna do that generally,
because as part of our preventive maintenance,
we wanna make sure we have really more space available,
keep that buffer space.
But if you have less than 15% space free,
you'll have to add the -f parameter
to actually force the defrag on that drive.
That could use a lot of computing power
and it could cause issues with some of the drive files.
So it's better really to move data, off board some data,
and try to get it above that 15% mark
so that you don't have to force it.
But you'll notice that the -F or /F is not listed here.
That's a separate value altogether.
And if you're in the command line
and you wanna know about the drives more,
you can use the diskpart utility.
And when we enter that,
that brings you to the diskpart shell.
And from there, we can do, say a list volume
to find out about the various volumes on this drive.
So you can see all the different volumes we have here
and whether or not they're healthy
and what type of volumes they are.
So that's basic information.
You've probably recognized this as well.
You can get to this
from the disk management utility as well.
And you can get to that tool
either from your administrative tools
or you can do it in the Run prompt, diskmgmt.msc,
that's a Microsoft console window.
And that shows all those volumes right here.
Compared to the command prompt,
command prompt shows the size,
but it doesn't show what's free
for that particular command,
but here you actually see the free space as well
and the % free.
So for example, my G drive is getting pretty low.
We're gonna have to offload some files soon from that.
And really the C drive too.
We're gonna have to clean that up.
If those were to go below 15% free
and we wanted to do the defrag,
we'd have to force that in the command line
with that -f.
Okay, so a couple tools there
that you definitely wanna look at.
A disk cleanup, which is built into Windows.
Take a look at some third party cleanup programs
like CCleaner and also the disk defrag program
in the GUI and in the command line.
So remember that besides the physical connections,
you might be troubleshooting in one of three places,
the BIOS, a RAID utility if you have RAID,
or the operating system,
and we'll be discussing each of these in more detail
as we progress through the videos.
So that's it for this sub lesson.
I'm Dave signing off,
and I'll see you at the next video.