Before hard drive failure occurs, there will be several warning signs you would do well to heed. By spotting and taking not of these warning signs you can make sure to take measures to prevent permanent data loss.
Hard drive failure cannot be prevented. Hard drives usually have a shelf life of about five years before they start to slow and eventually fail. Luckily, before your hard drive fails completely, it will give your these four warning signs.
1. If you hear a clicking sound during operation
A clicking sound coming from your hard drive can mean one of several things is going wrong. There could be a head crash or an electrical problem such as a burned chip. Clicking might also indicate the presence of corrupt firmware, a damaged PCB controller or hard drive platter, or that the servo’s were overwritten.
If you start hearing a clicking after your machine was dropped or if you experienced a power surge, clicking can mean that the hard drive was damaged and has alignment issues.
2. Continuous rebooting
If you try to turn your computer on and it just reboots again and again, this means that you have a virus that has taken over your boot sector. The virus programs the system to continuously reboot. It could also mean that there is something wrong with your BIOS settings.
3. Freezing or hanging
If your computer freezes or hangs while you are trying to boot up or when you are trying to open a program or file, this usually means that the information that they system needs to load the program or open the file is located on a bad sector on your hard drive.
Bad sectors on your hard drive usually occur when there are corrupt files, when shared program files have conflicting call procedures. They can also occur, however, when your device lacks system memory and it no longer has the resources to run all your programs.
4. Blue screens
If you are booting up your computer or were working and suddenly see a blue screen, this can mean that you are in danger of data loss.
The common reasons behind seeing the blue screen is that the OS is damaged or that there are bad sectors on your hard drive that are now unreadable. This can mean that your hard drive is failing or some partitions and file structures are damaged. This could also mean that you have been infected by a Trojan or virus or that you have accidentally deleted some important system files.
While you can’t totally prevent hard drive failure, being aware of the signs of hard drive failure can ensure that you can take steps to ensure that your data is protected.
One of the best ways to ensure that you are protected against data loss is to regularly back up your hard drive. Installing backup software, like DataNumen Disk Image or DataNumen Backup, makes it easy to create updated backups of the data on your hard drive.
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