Hard Drive Diagnostics Part #1

Today consisted of a failed hard drive. This is *EXTREMELY* common. Which will bring me to a rant about data backup another day. If your computer is acting "funny" diagnostics are in order. Don't wait until it dies to check it for problems, be proactive and SAVE money and time!

Lets start with HARD DRIVE diagnostics.

Questions first:

• What is a hard drive?
• What size is your hard drive?
• Do you have enough hard drive space?
• Have you been taking care of your hard drive?

A hard drive is a physical storage device in your computer. That's where all of you pictures, music, videos, operating system (windows xp/vista etc), documents, internet browsers, etc etc etc are stored. They range in size and shape but will generally be sold as 2.5" on a laptop and 3.5" on a desktop.

To get a basic idea of how much storage space you have available to use, open the "My Computer" window. Click the start button and locate my computer or check the desktop (background) for an icon called "My Computer"

Most people will have a Local Disk (c:) -- listed under Hard Disk Drives. Right click the drive and click properties. You'll see a pie chart -- blue = used space / purple = free space.

You will want *at least* 5GB or more free space available. (Some games take up more space than this!)

BEFORE YOU DO ANY OF THESE STEPS BACKUP YOUR COMPUTER!

I like Western Digital hard drives. Here's 1TB drive with a good price tag:
Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 1 TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive WDH1U10000N

I'll include an article on how to do that some other day. I know, I know.

Lets start with CHKDSK because it's super easy to use.

According to Microsoft: "Chkdsk.exe is the command-line interface for a program that verifies the logical integrity of a file system on Windows. When CHKDSK encounters logical inconsistencies it takes actions to repair file system data, provided it is not in read-only mode." Microsoft recommends you do NOT interrupt the process. Be aware that disk checking will take a long time for most computers, BE PATIENT! One last warning: CHKDSK rarely freezes up, so give it time.

Here the basic run down. Open My Computer. Right click a hard drive to test, and click properties. On the properties window click the tools tab at the top. In the tools tab click the check now button. Choose your options, and click check. If its your primary hard drive, or a drive that Windows doesn't have full control of, it will ask you to schedule the scan and reboot.

See Video:

This is a great first step to diagnosing hard drive problems. If you see errors while the scan is running it might be time to move on to a more detailed diagnostic. That will have to wait for my next post, and isn't recommended for the average home user. Unless you're feeling lucky. You are feeling lucky....aren't you?

If it's already too late and you think you've lost some very valuable information get in touch with these guys:

We've used them, and had some pretty good luck. We even got a sweet mouse pad from them a few years back. I don't think they do that anymore. For systems that still boot up, or you're just curious check out their *FREE* hard drive scanner. You'll need to use IE though. :-P