How to Prevent Hard Disk Failure

Hard Disk Disaster

Imagine that you woke up tomorrow morning, powered up your computer and discovered that your hard disk drive was kaput, all of your work, all of your pictures, all of your music everything lost, never again to see the light of day.

Hard Disk Drives are very delicate pieces of hardware and they can develop faults very easily, from a simple corrupt file to a complete hard disk failure.

What can you do when your Hard Disk develops a fault and how can you recover from a system failure.

They say Prevention is better than cure and in the case of your hard drive this is a good rule to follow.

Prevent Disk Faults

There are a few simple things that you can do to reduce the chances of a disk fault occuring,

Never move your computer when it is switched on and try not to knock it.

Don't place your computer near to or next to a heat source because it can cause over-heating.

Hot and Cold if for some reason you have left your laptop in the trunk of your car over night and then bring it in to your home or office, do not power it up right away, give it at least thirty minutes to get up to room temperature.

Shut Down If you take a break from your computer for half an hour, it is better to leave it switched on, but if you are not going to use your computer for several hours then it is ok to shut it down.

Shutting down your computer properly is important, as a sudden shutdown can corrupt the data stored on the disk.

CHKDSK/F

To check that your hard disk is ok, hold down the windows and "R" keys on your keyboard, type in cmd and press enter to open a command prompt window then type in chkdsk, this checks for errors but doesn't fix them but if you type in Chkdsk/f it will fix any errors that it finds during the scan.

Test Your Backups

We all know the importance of Backing up your data to a removable disk, but you should also test your backups, being sure that you can actually read the files back again, you don't want to be half way through restoring your files and discover that your backup disk has a fault