If you have lots of wealth like
gold, platinum, emerald or diamonds in your possession, you will
definitely try to keep them in a safe vault. You want their 100% safety
and you don’t want to leave any chance for them to get damaged or
stolen. In regards to personal computing, the hard drive of your
computer can be compared with a humongous vault that contains a massive
amount of information, data and programs. Most of the items you have
left there are vital with respect to your computing needs – and some
could be assets even more precious than expensive gems.
By every means, the hard drive of
your computer is one of the most important devices attached to your PC.
You need to ensure a inside your PC, capable of delivering top notch
data storage and retrieval services when you need. Otherwise, your PC
could easily become hard to drive!
In the older days, there used to be
complex processes that needed to be performed on hard drives in order to
maintain, check or repair them. MS DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating
System) based utilities were widely used that only a techno savvy person
was able to handle successfully. But now the situation is changing
rapidly. As the new generation operating systems evolve tremendously in
terms of simplifying user’s administrative and maintenance features,
anyone with a basic technical know how could perform various computer
maintenance and repair activities on hard drives that are very useful.
Hard Drive Error Types and How to Fix Them
Apart from mechanical or electronic
flaws at hardware level, a hard drive could have three other types of
errors at the systems level;
- MBR (Master Boot Record) Fault and the Boot Fault
- File System Fault
- Bad Physical Sector Faults
MBR (Master Boot Record) Fault and the Boot Fault
An MBR is a little piece of information (a small file) stored in the 1st sector
of the hard drive that generally tells how many logical drives the hard
drive has, their capacity and which logical drive should be used for
the system to boot from. Logical drives are like drive letters C, D …G
that we often see under “My Computer” and we use them to store files or
programs. Actually a hard drive could have only one or more than one
partition, but for better usability, hard drives are often partitioned
more than once. And in that case, their logical drive names ranges from
C, D, E and F to G or H.
Now this MBR thing is still a
complicated issue but can be used to fix boot errors. I will cover this
at the end, just after finishing off on the easy stuff. To fix the other
two types of faults mentioned above, you may take the following steps.
File System Fault
Please note that if you have
experienced hard drive failure then using some system tools such as
Check Disc can reduce your chances of data recovery.
1. Go to your “Windows explorer” by right clicking on the Windows “Start button” and then selecting “Computer”.
2. Here you will see the list of all your logical drives like C, E, F and G.
3. Now let’s say for example you
want to check your G drive for errors. Bring the mouse over on the G
drive and right click and then select “properties ” at the bottom of the
menu. This will launch the properties window for your G drive as shown
below.
4. On this screen, you can also
perform several other useful features in addition to fixing drive
errors. For example, if your PC is shared by several users, you can
limit drive space quotas for these users so that one user cannot fill up
the entire hard drive. To enable quota system, you can hit “quota” on
the top menu and then click “show quota settings”. Select “yes” when the
Windows user account security will ask for confirmation to proceed. Now
you will come on the quota management screen as shown in image 3.
Select “enable quota management” and then select “limit disk space to”
and then enter the value of maximum quota the user should be able to use
in the drop down box. That should limit the quota to this new assigned
value you just entered.
5. On the hard drive properties
window, you can also perform several other functions using the
“security” tab and the “sharing” tab. For example, if you want to limit a
particular user not to be able to “modify” anything on your G drive,
you can do that in the “security” screen. And if you are in a Local Area
Network (LAN) and want to share the G drive with another user on the
same network, you can do that in the “sharing” screen.
Now let’s go back to fixing hard drive problem.
1. Click on the “Tools” tab. You
will reach the screen as shown in image 4. Hit “Check Now” on this
screen. Select “Yes” confirming Windows that you want to proceed.
2. You will now reach the check disk
screen for G drive as shown in image below. Here you can select both
the options or just the 1st one to start with. It is recommended to begin with the 1st option as the system itself will prompt you to perform the bad sector scan after completion of the 1st option if it sniffs any bad sectors in your hard drive.
Keep in mind that the bad sectors
cannot be recovered all the time, but performing these operations will
help the OS understand that there are bad sectors in your hard drive and
it will be better prepared to accommodate them or rather stay away from
them. Running the file system scan will fix all the file system related
errors in your G drive.
Bad Physical Sector Faults
If bad sectors are detected after going for the 2ndoption,
it will be sensible to replace the hard drive with a new one and
transfer all the data to the new one before it is too late. After fixing
one logical drive G, now you can perform the same operation on other
logical drives.
Physical Failure: Physical
failure is the major cause of hard drive failure results in damaged
inner equipment’s such as platter, head crash, spindle motor etc. But
there is a good possibility that your data is still intact and
accessible by some special recovery software.
Most common reasons behind physical hard drive failure are due to
bumping, jarring or dropping the computer while it is running.
Fixing Master Boot Record (MBR)
Coming back to MBR fault, this is
often created by a boot sector virus making changes on the tiny MBR file
that you have in your hard drive. When the MBR gets corrupt, often the
system will wrongly show more logical drives than you actually have, or
their names will be changed erratically.
For example, you know you have only
drive C, D and E in your PC and suddenly you see there is an additional
drive F out of nowhere, more likely you have an MBR virus! The MBR can
be repaired by executing a command called “fixmbr” at the command
prompt. To do this, you need to boot off the installation disk in your
CD or DVD drive. When setup launches, go for the system recovery option
and to command prompt. At the command prompt, type: BootRec.exe /fixmbr
and hit enter. This should fix the MBR of your hard drive.
The BootRec.exe command is only for
Windows Seven and Vista, for Windows XP, at the command prompt you just
need to type: “fixmbr” command and hit enter. “fixboot” command can also
be used for fixing boot initialization problem. Here is more detailed
description of how to fix the MBR.
It is advisable not to try running
these commands unless you have a real good reason to do so. Having a
technical person right next to you is also not a bad idea if you don’t
have sufficient PC maintenance knowledge.
