Hard Drive Safety Tips
Keep Your Data Safe with Hard Drive SafetyHard drive safety is most important if your data is critical. Follow these safety rules.
- Protect the drive from shocks and jerks.
- Always handle the drive by its side. Never touch the underside of the drive or the drive electronics.
- When installing the hard drive, take care to screw it firmly to the chassis of the
- Also make sure the screws that come with the hard drive match the bore size on the drive.
- Never try to open a hard disk if it fails to respond. Even a particle of dust entering the insides of the drive can destroy the platter on the disk.
- Enable S.M.A.R.T. from the BIOS. This slows the drive down, but the difference is hardly noticeable for most applications -only 2-5 percent. S.M.A.R.T. is a technology that warns you when there's a problem and the drive is about to fail.
- Try not to install games, applications, and other system utilities on this partition as it will clutter the disk with other kinds of data and slow down disk access. Over a period of time, as a lot of data is stored and deleted it becomes imperative to defragment the data, which essentially means rearranging the data in one place so that access becomes faster. Windows itself provides you this utility, so you need not bother installing a third-party program. To access this utility, go to Start> Program> Accessories> System Tools> Disk Defragmenter. The time required to complete the defragmentation will depend on the hard drive capacity.
Another very useful built-in option you get with Windows is Scandisk, which can also be found in System Tools. It checks the hard drive for any errors—lost clusters, bad sectors, etc. You should perform this task once a month to keep your hard drive free from errors.
Software To Repair And Diagnose Hard Disk Errors The hard drive is one of the most important devices in your computer. It not only determines the amount of data you can save but also affect the performance of your system. It's a very sensitive device, so even small shocks could make it unusable. Bad sectors are a common problem most users face.
The desktop-level utilities available for such a problem are very basic and cannot eliminate such bad sectors. However, hard drive manufacturers have taken pains to develop utilities that take care of many such problems. Is it really a hard drive problem? If your system crashes endlessly and the program refuses to load, you may feel it's a problem with the hard drive. But the main cause could be something else—such as file corruption, a virus, damaged boot area, etc. What you can do before going to the repair center is to attach the hard drive in another system and take a backup of important data. After this, if you have the disk repair utility handy, run it and try to analyze the problem.
If this exercise fails, format the hard drive and try to reload the OS and other software. If this is successful, go ahead with the further installation. If it fails, the only option is to go to the service center for repairs. SHDIAG is a program that is used to diagnose hard disk problems. It works in DOS mode. The program automatically detects different hard drives attached to the system and asks the user to select one.
We recommend that you take a backup of your data before proceeding. Six different parameters of the hard drive are tested by SHDIAG. If there is no error found, it will complete the test and stop. If an error is found, the utility asks for permission to perform a low-level format. If the user press 'Yes', all information on the drive will be lost. If the problem still persists, check the cables. Unplug the hard drive and try either a different cable or different connectors on the same cable.