Hard Drive Easy Fixes: Solutions to Hard Drive Not Working

Hard drives are still incredibly important in the world today as they provide an affordable yet reliable form of storage. For those who've experienced these machines breaking down, it's important to learn how to prevent, identify, and fix a hard drive.

Create Backup Files on Another Hard Drive or Cloud

According to Slash Gear, the first thing that an owner needs to do with their hard drive, especially for very important content, is to create a backup. There are many ways people can create a backup, but the two most popular are either using an external hard drive or the cloud.

For an external hard drive, users would need to connect it to their computer, open the backup utility for the device they're using, create a backup destination, and select the external hard drive as the location for the saved files.

Users can either save specific files or back up their entire system. Once initiated, users would only have to wait for the completion and test whether the files are saved in the external device.

However, it's also important to note that external devices can also be quite fragile, and because of that, users can also choose another option, which is to save the information and files on a cloud. The benefits of a cloud are that they are easy to access and oftentimes secure unless the user themselves have been breached.

Being a victim of phishing or having your password or access stripped off is a risk that the user takes when they use cloud storage. Unlike external devices that are offline, cloud storages are online, which means they can be accessed remotely should users be compromised.

An article by Tom's Guide compares the difference between hard disk drives and cloud storage and comes to the conclusion that the best solution still highly depends on the user. As for identification, a hard drive often gives one very noticeable sign that it is declining in health.

How to Identify and Fix Broken Hard Drive

Once a hard drive runs slowly or has frequent error messages, this could be a sign that it is crashing. If applications also start to crash or users experience software glitches, this could be another sign that the hard drive is damaged.

With regards to recovering data from a hard drive, the first thing users should do is try a manual reboot by turning off, unplugging, waiting, and then restarting the computer. If this doesn't work, another thing users can do is access the hard drive externally.

Do this by carefully removing the hard drive and then hooking it to a different computer. Extract the needed files onto the next computer and possibly delete them from the original hard drive. An article by Computer Hope shows how users can recover data from a dead computer.

It's also important to note that users should always scan their hard drives before transferring files since the problem could be located within the hard drive itself. Corrupted files, malware, and other viruses could be the cause of a hard drive's issues.