A hard drive can fail in a few ways and not always is everything lost.
Remember, when something goes wrong with your computer, fold your arms, sit back, think a bit, stand up and walk away for a cuppa. Then take prudent action.
Of course, if smoke or fire exists, or it appears to have gone berserk, pull the plug and deal with it!
Usually it’s a little less critical and you do have time to consider your options.
Sometimes it’s not the hard drive – the cooling fan in the power supply can emit a devilish howl.
Try booting the computer. You can get a variety of error messages, some are easily fixed and some are not. Let’s consider a few and the possible fix for each. If you fail to resolve the problem on your first try, stop and get some help.
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Scan disk finds some bad sectors |
The sooner you replace this hard drive the better. Bad sectors are almost always the precursor to a total drive failure. If you replace it early you can usually recover your data from the old drive. |
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Trying to boot the computer gives the message that no bootable disc can be found |
The disc may still be readable but the boot files may be faulty. Depending on your Windows version you may be able to recover your system but seek help unless you really know what you are doing. |
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A true head crash or the disc sounds like a cement mixer |
Probably it’s all over Red Rover! New disc and reinstall. |
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Scandisk finds some cross-linked files or some other problem |
This is usually fixed in the process but a little glow in your mind should remind you if the problem recurs. Why is it happening? Is it a software problem or a hardware fault? This is not easy to resolve. |
These ideas are not meant to cover all the possibilities but may help you solve the problem. There are some people who specialise in recovering data from crashed hard drives. They are expensive. You may be able to cope with recovering data from a dying disc but don’t hammer the drive with scandisk or defrag or there may be nothing left on it.
Providing you have a comprehensive backup, replacing a hard drive is simply time consuming and costly – eventually you should recover.
Once you have your machine running again you can attempt to recover the data from the old disc.
There are many methods of connecting your old drive to a correctly running machine. One way is to connect the old drive to the motherboard as an extra drive on the correctly running machine. Reset the BIOS to recognise the old second drive as a slave. You can run the computer with this setup enabling the copying of files from the old to the new hard drive. Copy what you want into a new folder on the C drive, say called OldC. Then shut down, remove the old drive and reset the BIOS if required. Now reboot.
If this is too hard, get help. All is not lost.
There is loads more that could be said but this should be sufficient to alert you to the basic answers.