How do I fix Hard disk Drive Issues?

HDD Troubleshoot

In our last video we have seen that what is Hard disk drive & everything about HDD. Now, in today's video we will learn the steps to troubleshoot a HDD. We will cover everything regarding HDD troubleshooting like recovering lost data without losing current data, recovering deleted data, which software to use for recovering, & etc...

Following are the basic things which one can do to troubleshoot Hard disk drives Errors :
- Hard drive recovery is necessary for failed drives in computers without scheduled backups.
- Pay attention to the sounds which Hard disk drive is making.
- Turn Off Your Computer.
- Check Your Connections.
- Look For Your Drive in Your BIOS.
- Put the Drive in an External Enclosure.
- Don't Ever Open Your Drive.
- One thing which we all should do is to keep the backup of our Important data which is stored in our Hard disk drives. If by chance anywhere the data is lost then back-up will always have that which can be very helpful.
- If your Hard drive start showing problem then the first thing which we need to do is to transfer and store that particular data to a safe place in order save it. Many times HDD showing problem results in losing the stored data, that's why.

To check the bad sector of Hard drive without losing any data from Command prompt, follow the below mentioned steps :
- Click Start.
- Type cmd at the Search program and files search box
- Right-click on cmd.exe.
- Click Run as Administrator.
- Type in your Administrator password.
- When cmd.exe opens, type the command: chkdsk.
- Press Enter.
- You can run the tool with more parameters, like this : chkdsk c: /r.

To remove the cache memory stored in the Local disk for improving the OS performance we can follow the below steps :
- Right click on Local Disk (C:).
- Open Properties.
- Click on Disk Cleanup button in General properties section.
- Click OK button & deleting of file will start.

First thing to do when Hard disk drive start showing problem is to clear all the Temp files & Disk cleanup of C drive from your computer.

Disk Formatting :
- There are two formatting procedures required before you can write user data to a disk.
• Physical or Low level formatting (to delete all the data and re-install the Operating System whole again to remove the virus)
• Logical or High level formatting

Sometimes our pendrive is not properly detected or shown in our device, so for that we will use the below mentioned command in order to properly function it :
- Press 'Windows + R' key from the keyboard.
- After that we'll write Diskpart and give Enter.
- We will then run the command to see the total disk, ie. 'list disk'
- After that, we will run the command to see the total partitions of our disk, ie. 'list vol'
- We will use 'sel disk 1' to select the particular hard disk drive & then further perform any action in it.
- To clear all the data stored in the selected hard disk drive we can use 'clean' command. All the data will be lost.
- Sequence :
• Diskpart
• List Disk
• Select any disk
• Clean
• Create part pri
• Active
• Format fs=ntfs quick
• Assign

If the data is not properly shown in any of the external devices, then we can just simply use the above shown command.

We can use 'Hard disk Sentinel' software to know the free space of our Harddisk & mainly to check the Performance & Health of our HDD. We can also run the Random Seek Test to see the Seek Time & Temperature of our attached HDD. It should be in a certain range. It will help us to know that is our hard disk getting heated or not because it directly affects the performance of it. Similarly we have an Short Test which will be off 1 min around and will show if any problem is there within our harddisk or not.

We can also see the Temperature range of our HDD & it's total overview using 'Hard disk Sentinel' software. We can also view the performance of Disk which shows everything like total data read & write information, average & current transfer rates, also the maximum transfer rate, average disk activity, current disk activity, estimated Max. transfer rate & other transfer rate information. Using the Hard disk Sentinel's Surface Test we can inspect the sectors.

Another software which is same as the Hard disk Sentinel is 'HDD Regenerator 2011'. We can open & click on the firstly shown interface to repair physical bad sectors on damage drive surface directly under Windows XP, Vista, and 7. We will then further select the HDD which we want to scan & hence our process will start.
We will be redirected to a CMD window where we can choose our action for the Harddisk we want to perform. Action are as follows :
1. Prescan (show bad zones)
2. Normal Scan (with/without repair)
3. Version Info
4. Show Statistics

As we select action 1, the processing will start and it will show the temperature and the progress of pre scan of our HDD. At the end of the scan we will be shown the number of bad sectors and delays found.

HDD Regenerator allows to repair bad sectors on damaged hard disk drives without losses of the existing data. It supports many types of hard drives and can be used with any file system including FAT, NTFS, ext3, hfs+ etc. Unformatted and unpartitioned disks are also supported.

Sometimes by mistake we format the stored data of our hard disk and it is then deleted. So to recover that deleted data we will use the two mostly used HDD data recovery software ie. 'Recuva' & 'EaseUS'. Using this two softwares we can not only recover the data from our hard disk but also from our memory card or pendrive.

We can simply go to 'EaseUS' software & click on the Scan button of the desired HDD we want to scan. It will study & scan all the data from that harddisk which can be a very time consuming process. This is the best software for recovering the deleted data for any external device.

Similarly we have Recuva software which works exactly the same as we have seen for 'EaseUS'. Hence, we can use any of the software fro the two discussed software for recovering the deleted data.