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The hard drives that we have inside of our computers are
spinning mechanical devices.
And they are prone to failure.
So it's important to know what we can do when we run into
problems with our hard drive components.
If you're using your computer and you get a message on your
screen saying that there's some type of failure when
reading and writing, you might get a message like this one
that says, cannot read from the source disk.
Well that certainly points to some type of problem with the
storage device on that computer.
Sometimes you don't even get an error message.
You'll just get a blue screen of death and it's pointing to
some type of problem with corrupted files, maybe there
are read/write failures.
And the whole reason we're having these issues is because
the hardware itself on the storage
device is having a problem.
One thing you can do to check the hard drive is to run a
Check Disk.
And there's an option inside of Check Disk is to check
every single sector on a surface analysis.
That way you can be sure that it is reading and writing to
every single part of that disk successfully.
If you're noticing that things are slowing down, especially
when you're trying to read a file or write a file, make
sure you check the LED lights the flash whenever there's
disk activity.
If you notice they're flashing over and over and over again
as it's trying to retry that disk, then you might be having
a problem with that hardware.
It may be a good time to back up.
And, of course, if anything sounds odd, especially as it's
trying to read that disk and you hear the drive resetting
itself and making clicking noise, that certainly speaks
to a hard drive problem.
You should immediately back up your data and you need to look
at replacing that drive as soon as possible.
One problem you don't want to run into, is when you start up
your computer and you see a message that says, the drive
is not recognized.
You need to look very closely at status lights, examine the
messages that are on your screen to help determine more
about where the problem might be occurring.
Sometimes I will plug-in an external
USB drive to my laptop.
I'll forget I have it there.
I'll power down my system and power it back on.
And my computer is configured to try to boot from that USB.
And I receive a message that says, the system can't find an
operating system.
And suddenly I'm very concerned.
But then I realize, of course, that I have the USB drive
plugged in and I can unplug it and restart my system and it
starts normally.
I could get around this problem by changing the boot
sequence in my BIOS and tell it not to check for any USB
drives to boot from to go automatically to the internal
hard drive inside of my laptop and don't check anything that
might be plugged in externally.
You can also disable the interface
completely if that's a concern.
That way you can be assured that nothing will look at that
interface when it goes through the boot up process.
If we haven't changed anything we haven't plugged-in any
external devices and the problem may just be something
physical inside of our computer.
So it may be worthwhile opening it up and making sure
that all of those connections are tight.
Our systems get hot and they cool down.
And occasionally we'll have a cable problem
inside of our computer.
So make sure it's not something simple that you can
easily resolve by tightening down all of those connections.
And if this is a new storage device, we want to be sure
that our configurations are set exactly the
way they should be.
So if this is a padded drive, you may want to look at the
jumpers on the drive and make sure that we have everything
plugged into the right interface.
And if it's SCSI connectors, we want to be sure that all of
our SCSI IDs are configured properly.
And the terminator is at the end of that SCSI chain.
If we start up our computer, it goes to our storage device
to try to boot and we see a message that says the
operating system is not found.
Well that speaks to more of a file system problem.
And a common workaround is to rebuild the Master Boot Record
and perhaps also rebuild the boot sector on that drive.
In Windows XP we would do this from the Recovery console.
We can use fixmbr to override the Master Boot Record.
And do a fixboot c: to update the boot sector that's on
their drive.
If you're running Windows Vista or Windows 7 we do this
from the Command prompt.
And we use the bootrec command with a /fixmbr or a /fixboot
to fix either the Master Boot Record or the boot sector.
If you'd like to see exactly how this is done, I do an
entire hands-on session in my video called using the Windows
recovery console and command prompt.
It is from my 220-801 videos 1.3.
A lot of our server devices these days are using redundant
arrays of independent disks or RAID arrays.
And if we have problems with the controller itself, and we
start up our computer, we might see problems like the
RAID is not found.
So you may want to check the RAID configuration on your
computer and make sure the controller
itself is working properly.
If it's missing or it's faulty, we may see message
inside of our computer during the start up that will give us
messages that say this is not configured
and not working properly.
If we start up our computer and we get a message that the
array itself is having a problem, then we may want to
launch the RAID console that's on your computer to see what
the status is for the drives.
The different RAID manufacturers have different
ways of doing this.
So you want to check your documentation to see which one
works for you so that you can tell if drives are available
in the RAID, if any happen to be missing.
And you want to be able to correlate back the numbers of
the drives with a physical drive inside of your computer.
You don't want to replace the wrong drive
inside of your array.
So make sure you double check and that you're replacing
exactly the right drives.