If you find yourself in need of knowing the methods of how to repair a damaged hard drive and so far you have not found a satisfactory solution, in this article we are going to show you the reasons why this has stopped working, it is doing it erratically and if it is possible to find a solution to the problem.
The worst thing that can happen to any user is that overnight their hard drive has stopped working, without having given previous symptoms. This usually happens on very few occasions, since as a general rule, when a hard drive is on the last, it offers us a series of tracks.
HDD vs. SSD
Before entering the matter, we must know the differences between hard drives (Hard Disk Drive) and SSD (Solid State Drive) Hard drives are an electronic device made up of a board, a physical disk and an arm that is responsible for reading and writing information along the disk. Its operation is very similar to that of a record player / turntable.
Being a physical element, the disk where the data is stored, over time it deteriorates. The useful life of hard drives is very high (they can last decades without giving any problem), quite the opposite of what happens with SSDs. When a hard disk starts to work slower than usual, it takes time to open applications, save files, start the computer, we must take action on the matter.
SSDs, they do not incorporate a disk, hence that word is not included to name them. The SSD is to call it an easy to understand way, like a memory that we can use in a smartphone, but that works at a much faster writing and reading speed. Unlike hard drives, SSDs can stop working overnight, without giving any prior symptoms.
Repair a damaged hard drive
As I mentioned in the previous section, a hard drive, unlike an SSD, begins to give symptoms of having a problem when the computer takes longer to start up than usual, in opening applications, in saving files, in search for files in Windows...
The first thing we must discard is that the computer is indexing a large number of files that we have recently copied to the computer. The indexing process generates a list with the location of all the files so that, when searching, Windows does not have to search all the directories, a process that can take several minutes depending on the number of files to be searched.
If it is not our case, we will proceed scan the hard drive for errors in the file system by performing the following steps:
- We open the file explorer and go to This team.
- Next, we select the unit that we want to analyze, click on the right button and select Properties.
- In the window shown below, click on the tab Tools.
- To start the process of scanning the hard drive for errors, in the section Error checking click on Check.
Windows regularly checks the status of the hard disk thanks to SMART technology (technology that is responsible for repairing errors automatically), so as soon as you click on the Check button, the upper message will be displayed, indicating that no need to examine the unit, because it has not found errors.
However, to stay calm and rule out that our hard drive is damaged, click on Browse Drive. This process can last several minutes depending on the size of the hard drive.
At the end of the analysis, a report will be displayed with the problems that have been found and will offer us to solve them, including the possibility of recover information stored in bad sectors, sectors that have stopped working on the hard disk.
What is a bad sector
Bad sectors in red
Bad sectors are the main ones culprits that a hard drive stops working as it usually did. Bad sectors, as the name implies, are sections of the disk that have stopped working or that have some kind of problem, a problem that can be the reason for a hardware or software problem.
If it is a logic failure, the solution is found with the application to check Windows disks (or any other alternative available on the internet). A logical failure is due to a software error, that is, that sector cannot be read since the equipment cannot correctly identify it by offering the system an erroneous address.
Physical failure. If we talk about a physical failure, we are talking about hardware failure. This failure has no solution, since it is an error on the surface of the disk where information is stored, so the only solution is to replace the hard disk.
If the hard drive has stopped working overnight and the computer has received a hit (especially for laptops), the hard drive heads have probably changed position. If so, the solution is to send it to a specialized technical service that is in charge of putting the heads back in place and that the disk is operational again.
To avoid these types of problems, many notebook computers include software that takes care of detach the heads from the hard drive at the moment in which the equipment is turned off to avoid that during its movement, these can move and stop working.
Avoid hard drive errors
There is no recommendation to prevent our hard drive from malfunctioning. The best we can do to avoid scares and lose all information stored on a hard drive is to do Windows backups periodically
If the hard drive stops working, on Amazon we can find hard drives for very few euros, just like SSD, an option that we should take into account if we want improve the speed of our team.