Bad Hard Drives - How to diagnose, clone & repair.

Published 12 March 08 10:56 AM | RjBass 

Often times when a computer slows down it is not a virus or spyware that is causing the problem.  Sometimes it's memory, sometimes its just an old installation of Windows that really needs to start over, and sometimes it's a hard drive that has gone or is going bad.  In this post I go over how to determine if your hard drive is going bad, and how to fix the problem if it is.  Read More

Comments

# Blog Picks said on March 13, 2008 12:03 AM:

Bad Hard Drives-How to diagnose, clone&repair If your hard drive is going bad, check this post you

# MrHelperGuy said on March 15, 2008 1:49 PM:

Good post, but you forgot a few little tidbits...

I didn't notice any mention of SMART (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Monitoring,_Analysis,_and_Reporting_Technology)

If you have SMART support in your BIOS (any PC made in the last few years should), be sure to enable this as this will help bring failing drives to your attention before tragedy strikes. In addition, you may wish to use a software application that supports SMART monitoring.

Also, if your drive has failed, or you have the click of death and you want to move things off while you still can, one common technique is to put the disk in a freezer ziplock, perhaps more than one, and freeze it for at least a day. Read up on it here:

http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/01/freeze-your-hard-drive-to-recover-data.html

This is somewhat of a last resort, but it's sometimes just enough to get something critical off the disk...

Good luck! MHG