- In this sub lesson,
we're gonna talk about hard drive failures.
It's not a matter of if,
it's a matter of when.
Hard drives will fail,
it's just a matter of time.
This sub lesson contains a big mix of elements.
There's a lot of things
that we're gonna be talking about.
So keep in mind that we're gonna be
running through a lot of possible issues
with hard drives.
Let's get started with the sub lesson now
- We'll start with read/write failures
and slow performance.
If you have a little bit of a problem
reading data from the drive
or writing data to the drive,
let's say you can't save a Microsoft Word document
or another document that you're working in,
or let's say it's very slow.
Let's say you load up an application, or a file,
and it's very slow coming up on your screen.
Well, you're gonna want to analyze that further.
And there's several tools you can use to do that.
One of the first tools is disk management,
and you can open this from the search tool,
or you can go to run prompt
and type DISK MGMT.MSC.
It's also in the computer management.
And so, however you want to get to it,
once you open it you'll see all of your volumes,
and you'll see the healthy status,
well you'll see the status column.
And hopefully they're healthy,
but quite often if you're getting a lot of
read/write failures or slow performance,
it may say something different here.
So, you're gonna wanna check that out.
And it also shows it here,
whether they're healthy or not.
It could be that you have too much data
on that particular volume.
You know, for example,
this volume here C has 120 gigabyte capacity
and the free space is only 24 gig.
If we start going any lower than that
if we start getting below, say 15% free
you might actually see some performance degradation
and even possibly some read/write failures
but possibly that slow performance on this guy.
So this disc, you know, it's, it's getting pretty packed
and I'm gonna have to work on that
to be honest with you, you're gonna have to check that
and probably remove some data, move it to another partition
another volume, or uninstall some applications, et cetera.
But the main thing here is that status.
You really wanna check that status field
and see if your device is healthy or not.
And if not, then you might have to
do one of a couple things.
First, you might need to do a disc defrag
and disc defragmentor, this could be opened up,
from the search tool or from the run prompt.
You can type DFR GUI
and that'll bring up your disc defragmentor tool.
And you can check each volume that has been activated
and has been formatted.
Has to be a formatted volume to show up here.
You see here that my C drive is 1% fragmented
not a big deal, but it wasn't checked.
It wasn't analyzed since two years ago.
So if you see that
then you're definitely gonna want to analyze the disc
and if necessary defrag it generally, you don't have to
unless it's 5% or higher fragmented.
This becomes a little less
of an issue with solid state drives.
But contrary to some of the popular belief out there
solid state drives do sometimes need to
be defraged as well.
And so that'll depend though, but generally
it's the magnetic discs that you're looking at.
You wanna see if they're 5%, 10% fragmented
then you wanna run the disc defragmentor.
So if you have read/write failures or slow performance
that's a couple of things you can check.
You can also go to your command prompt and use some
of your hard drive checking tools,
for example, check disk
and you know, you'll see you have lots of options.
If you do a slash question mark, for example
slash F can fix some errors
on the disc that might be causing you the slow performance
and you might also have bad sectors
and you can try to recover those with the slash R.
So that's a possibility as well.
So a couple tools there in the command prompt, for example
also SFC you might use.
And we'll talk about that a little bit more
in the next sub lesson.
So use your command prompt, use your disc.
Defragmentor, use your disc management to check
on hard drive issues and see what the problem is.
These usually can be fixed, you know
through a combination of check disc and disc defrag
and uninstalling applications that are causing problems.
Usually these things can be fixed
but there are other symptoms you might encounter
that get a little bit worse.
For example, loud clicking noises.
If you start to hear clicking
or grinding from a drive that uses moving parts, you know
a drive that is a magnetic disc
then you're gonna want to back up that data right away,
verify the backup and make sure
that you can view that data from another system.
Make sure that backup went through, okay,
use the verification option when you do the backup
and then actually view some of the data on that
drive, randomly select some data
and make sure it comes up properly on another system.
And then replace that drive altogether, reload, dos
and restore the data. Don't mess
with any loud clicking noises.
The only time that loud clicking noises is okay, is for
much older scuzzy drives, parallel scuzzy drives.
Nowadays you don't want that.
For the newer scuzzy drives,
serial attached scuzzy drives,
you're not gonna have that.
And you shouldn't have that for a SATA magnetic disc.
You shouldn't have any noise
for a solid state drive.
Next it's failure to boot.
Well, if you can't boot to the drive, well
that's the big problem, right?
And then you're gonna want to look
at this from more of a physical and firmware standpoint.
If there's a failure to boot altogether
then you're gonna wanna check in the bios
or your UFI see if the drive is recognized
and see if it is the first drive on the bios boot order,
or at least somewhere on the bios boot order
where it would be possible to boot from.
Then you're also gonna wanna check the connections.
You may need to check the power and data connections
to that drive, make sure that it is getting power
and that those connections are secure.
The drive might not be recognized.
It could be for some reason
that the firmware didn't recognize the drive
and you need to update the firmware
with flash, or the drive isn't connected properly,
or perhaps Windows did not recognize the drive.
It's a possibility.
It's also possible that that drive was not initialized.
Again in disc management.
If you have a drive that you want to use
you've gotta initialize that disc.
And you've got to do this here in some cases, in order
for it to show up in Windows Explorer or File Explorer.
And you also wanna make sure
that it is formatted to a file system.
For example, NTFS, here
the C drive is formatted to NTFS and we can use it.
And that's why we could see it in the disc defragmentor
and in windows Explorer, but the G drive that's raw.
That means it hasn't been formatted yet.
I created the primary partition.
You can see that
with the dark blue, here, but hasn't been formatted.
So it shows up as raw
and it won't show up in windows Explorer or File Explorer,
and it won't show up in the disc defragmentor
because it's not been recognized fully yet.
So a couple possibilities for the drive
not being recognized.
And the OS not found, that's always a good message as well.
The operating system not found
then you can't boot to the OS.
This is the bane of technicians.
And it could be, again, a media issue.
It could be that the boot priority's
not configured properly,
and there could be ...
it could be that there's a faulty disc
in the optical drive,
and the optical drive is set to first.
You always check that bios boot order, if not
you're gonna have to look
at that hard drive and see what the problem is.
Now, if the hard drive seems to be accessing properly
but the operating system isn't there
then you're gonna want to go further.
You're gonna wanna check the boot sector,
the master boot record if you're using NBR.
Check the GPT if you're using that,
and check the main boot manager file.
So for example, for Windows 7 or Windows 8
that's gonna be boot MGR.
You're gonna wanna check if that file's there.
If it's loading up properly, you can always take the drive
and take it out of the system and slave it
to another machine and see if those files are there.
See if anything needs to be replaced,
you can also do an automated repair if necessary.
But, generally it's a priority type of thing
or the drive hasn't been recognized, that type of thing.
So that that's some of the common symptoms
you might see, your read/write failures,
your slow performance, and again,
remember to use that disc management tool for that.
It's gonna be very telling,
you're gonna be able to identify a lot
of problems from here,
and then you'll know which way to go to fix the problems.
You know, again, you might have to defrag the drive,
do a check disc, you run an SFC, which by the way
you have to run as an administrator
in the command prompt, loud clicking noises.
You're gonna need to replace that drive right away.
You have to back up the data right away.
Imaging the drive might not be a good idea
because that might put it over the edge.
So watch out for that, definitely back
up all the data and check that data somewhere else
and then restore to a new drive.
Failure to boot, drive not recognized,
OS not found for these things.
Make sure that you check the connections,
make sure that you check the bios or the UFI boot priority.
Make sure that the firmware can actually identify the drive
which may require a flash of that firmware.
And make sure that the the NBR and the
boot system is set up properly.
You know, sometimes you might have a dual boot
or you might have changes to the operating system
which change the NBR or the GPT.
And you might need to go into the startup repair.
You might need to go into the Windows recovery environment
and either do a automatic startup repair
or use the boot rack command to repair the system
with the rebuild BCD option and/or the fixed boot option.
And maybe even the fixed NBR, if you're doing a dual boot.
So lots of possibilities here, and some things to watch
for when it comes to hard drive issues.