Is my hard drive about to pack up?
Discussion
My computer is an aging machine, must be about 5 years old now.
The hard drive makes excessive noise when booting sometimes which gradually quitens down after 2 or 3 minutes in Windows once its loaded.
Every week or so it also just freezes and the harddrives whirrs away for about a minute, then stops and the you can carry on as usual.
Just recently its booted up saying bad sectors have been found on the disk offering me the chance to "fix it".
Is my hard drive on its last legs? Time for a full backup and a new HD?
Thanks
The hard drive makes excessive noise when booting sometimes which gradually quitens down after 2 or 3 minutes in Windows once its loaded.
Every week or so it also just freezes and the harddrives whirrs away for about a minute, then stops and the you can carry on as usual.
Just recently its booted up saying bad sectors have been found on the disk offering me the chance to "fix it".
Is my hard drive on its last legs? Time for a full backup and a new HD?
Thanks
Absolutely concur your HDD is about to shuffle of this mortal coil.
Just made a small sum from a client who ignored the same warning signs that your drive is showing then had to come to me to recover all his tax return data
and replace the faulty drive.
Do the backup and replace the drive now!!!
As an interim measure (not a substitute to a proper backup but it might save your data) connect the new drive to the same machine and do a disk to disk copy. (or put the old drive in another machine and do the same.)
Dave
www.arctsys.co.uk
Just made a small sum from a client who ignored the same warning signs that your drive is showing then had to come to me to recover all his tax return data
and replace the faulty drive. Do the backup and replace the drive now!!!
As an interim measure (not a substitute to a proper backup but it might save your data) connect the new drive to the same machine and do a disk to disk copy. (or put the old drive in another machine and do the same.)
Dave
www.arctsys.co.uk
Not trying to be funny, but hard drives are currently one of the cheapest parts to replace on a computer (PC or Mac).
And hard drives seem to be the first thing to destroy small businesses.
Back it up immediately, whatever media you have. Then buy another hard disk (50 quid?) and copy it all over.
One easy way is to get a USB (2) hard drive for PC people, or Firewire for Mac, for between 100-200 quid. Use this for weekly backups.
As extra info - hard drives don't like heat or duff power supplies. I have 8 machines on my home network and one particular machine has eaten 3 HDs whereas nothing else has. The dodgy machine is a Cube Mac which runs at high temps and has an external power supply that is *very* susceptible to power cuts.
In other words, keep your machines cool and run UPS if you can afford / justify it.
And hard drives seem to be the first thing to destroy small businesses.
Back it up immediately, whatever media you have. Then buy another hard disk (50 quid?) and copy it all over.
One easy way is to get a USB (2) hard drive for PC people, or Firewire for Mac, for between 100-200 quid. Use this for weekly backups.
As extra info - hard drives don't like heat or duff power supplies. I have 8 machines on my home network and one particular machine has eaten 3 HDs whereas nothing else has. The dodgy machine is a Cube Mac which runs at high temps and has an external power supply that is *very* susceptible to power cuts.
In other words, keep your machines cool and run UPS if you can afford / justify it.
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