Checking Hard Drive Errors

Posted by nabeelshaukat on October 14th, 2010

When to check hard drive for errors:

Hard drive is the place where mostly the data is kept by the organization or by an individual. So, when the hard drive fails, there are high chances that all your important data would lose. Therefore, you must know some signs that point out to the chances of hard drive failure. If you successfully find the error then you can fix it easily. However, the hard drive may not indicate any symptoms before it fails. You may have worked normally one day, but the next day processor may even fail to read data from it. Normally, the hard drive starts with some bad sectors and they keep on increasing over a period of time. If you decide earlier for trouble shooting then you can save much of your important data.

Here are some important points that one should keep in mind as they directly indicate that a check-up of hard drive is required.

• If you fail to access a particular program/file/section saved on your hard drive, or it takes a longer time to open it then you should check the hard drive for speed and viruses.
• If your disk defragmentation program indicates that a proper check is required then don’t waste time or delay it.
• If you listen strange noises coming from hard drive then a proper check is compulsory and urgent.

How to check your hard drive:

DOS (Disk Operating System) is not in use these days, but you may have heard or learned about it. DOS has a ckhdsk command and it is still useful for many Windows operating systems. With the new add ups in technology, there are many other ways that can be applied, but let’s take a look and understand that how the old method of checking hard disks could work. You can find sufficient information on HARD DRIVE DATA RECOVERY.

The chkdsk command can be used to sort out many hard drive problems. The common problems are cross linked files, cluster problems, bad sector problems, and directory errors. If you want to use this command properly, login to your computer as an administrator. Remember, this method is useful for Windows operating systems users only. Go to the DOS prompt (the command line) and type chkdsk. The time taken by this command in checking the drive depends upon the size of the disk, and amount of data kept on it.

It’s time to understand the meaning of the results being displayed.  If you see 0 on your display then it means no errors are found. A1 means that errors occurred, but resolved at the same time. 2 indicate that disk clean-up has been performed. If you can’t see a /f then it means that the clean-up failed to be performed. If you see 3 on your display then it means that errors exist, but could not be fixed out.