Hard disk plays an important role to store user's data but if hard drive Start's acting abnormally or start doing unexpected things that you did not have faced before here's we will discuss how to know if a hard disk lifespan is decreasing to only a few days, weeks, months or years
How to understand Hard disk is dying?
There are a majority of ways to check the current status of the hard drives. If you notice some change in your computer performance, activities. Here are some points to see if your drive is dying
- Your PC might starts taking too long to turn on and too long to shutdown
- Desktop becomes unresponsive took very long to respond.
- Applications that you run taking more time to load or become unclickable and stopped responding, crash after some time.
- Data is transferring at a very slow speed or getting corrupt.
- If you play games you feel that your games lag a lot or crashes or even crashes your whole computer
- windows start giving you blue screen error messages after some minutes while working PC start freezing display goes black or even making noise
If you have noticed any upper signs then you have to check your hard disk there are many tools available on the internet for checking hard disk status like hard disk sentinel is an example of programs that tell your hard disk health and performance percentage
How to Fix a hard disk Drive?
In most cases, there is no way to fix or repair your hard drive but if your hard disk health is about 80% then this solution might work for you. What you have to do is you have to scan for bad sectors in your hard disk
What are Sectors on hard disks?
Sectors in hard disk refer to parts in your drive in which your hard disk Store Data. A sector may hold 512 bytes of data. A sector of hard disk is defined as "Subdivision of a track on magnetic discs which holds 512 bytes of data "
How to identify bad sectors in hard disks?
There are many programs that are used to check whether your hard disk contains bad sectors or not and how much a sector has defected however there are two types of bad sectors in hard disk
- Logical Bad sectors
- Physical Bad sectors
What are Logical Bad Sectors?
Logical bad sectors are also known as Soft bad sectors. these are clusters on the hard disk that cannot be able to access when an error correction code (ECC) occurs in the Hard disk this error occurs because the Data did not match the Content placed on the hard disk. this produces a logical error on the disk
Causes
There are many common reasons for logical bad sectors such as software issues, power outage stops giving power and your PC shutdown without a proper way during the hard drive is reading/writing thus this causes the logical bad sectors to appear
Solution:
There are many methods of resolving logical errors of hard disk but one of the one methods which I love and personally tried and also worked for me is as follows:.
- Important Notice: Before proceeding Copy and backup all your data in sphere hard disk. if you don't make a backup then EPCS is not responsible for any kind of data loss.
- After taking a backup you have to clean(wipe) all the hard disk data To do this you need any windows installation media like bootable USB or DVD boot from USB or DVD then deletes all the partitions and do a fresh installation of Windows
- Another method in which you don't have to install windows is rather doing a disk scan using CHDSK Which is a windows built-in program to run the disk check open windows explorer using windows key + E. Now right click on drive c and click on properties after that a new window open here click on the Tools tab then click on a check under the section "Error-checking"
- Run CHKDSK using Command prompt to do this you need to open CMD as an Administrator after you open as administrator type the command chkdsk C: Where C is the drive letter which you want to scan after that hit enters key.
- it might give you a message that the volume is busy or already used by another program then type y and press enter so that when you next time turns on your PC it will automatically start for scanning drive.
There is too much Third-party software also come which did the same thing so that I did not discussing here to make it easy and neat so that everyone can follow this guide.
Conclusion
There are many ways to resolve logical bad sectors in your hard drive but the method i prefer is to Delete all the partitions of your defective hard drive and create a new one which is a way much easier and time-saving method.
The Disk checking method is also good but it consumes a lot of your precious time like if you run a scan on an 80 GB hard drive it can take up to 2:30 hours of time to complete the scan.
The chances of success are almost 50% or less I personally Recommend you to clean install windows to solve the error.
What are Physical Bad Sectors?
Causes:.
- you are using your hard drive for a long time like 3 to 4 years which is the average life span of a hard disk.
- The Read/Write headers of the hard drive are got damage which is causing bad sectors.
- the unexpected shutdown is also the main reason for hard drive failure.
- Dust in the hard drive might be a reason for Hard Bad Sectors.
Solution
It is said that there is no solution to repair physical bad sectors because this error occurs in the plate of disk this means that the plates no longer be able to hold data and need's to replace hard disk the data which is stored in the physical bad sector got corrupted and cannot be recovered.
But you can try to clean it from hard drives motherboard it might work for you.