While working with computers, you often face a situation where your system is not able to boot at all or takes a long time to boot. Such a situation while booting, indicates that there could be a possible problem with the hard disk.
Hard disk crash is the most common problem occurring in such situation. More often, you might get some error messages while working with hard disk.
“disk boot failure”
Or
“operating system not found”
These messages are the indication of a possible crash of the hard drive. However, there are various other situations, which indicate that the hard disk has crashed. Some of them are mentioned below.
- An appearance of the blue screen known as ‘blue screen of death’ whenever you power on the computer indicates that the hard disk has crashed.
- A clicking or some other irritating noise coming from the hard disk shows a possible problem with the hard disk.
- Frequent system reboots and restarts could also be a hard disk failure symptom.
Hard disk failure can be categorized into logical failure and physical failure. Physical failure occurs due to any physical damage to the hard drive or any malfunctioning of the mechanical components within the hard drive. In case of logical corruption, the computer’s Basic Input Output System (BIOS) would not be able to detect the hard disk.
As a result you would not able to access any kind of data from it. The severity of the logical corruption could range from a single file to the entire data present on the computer. So, it is quite possible that in case of a severe logical corruption, you might not be able to access any data from your computer.
The information present on the hard drive is tracked with the file allocation table (FAT). FAT allocates the file on the disk and has the information regarding the next available space, utilized space and other free spaces on the hard disk. With fragmentation, even a small piece of information is spread all over the disk. In case of logical corruption, FAT is not able to manage the files and thus lead to data loss.
Logical corruption could also be categorized as a software error. Out of the many software related issues, which lead to logical corruption, firmware corruption is one of the most common software errors.
Firmware is a dedicated software, which helps in detecting and interacting with hard drives. In case of any issue with the software will lead to its corruption. As a result, it would not be able to detect the hard drive accurately. Some of the most common reasons for firmware corruption are mentioned below.
- BIOS is not able to detect the hard drive
- Computer hangs up while booting.
Note: In such cases the data remains intact with the drive, but, the firmware needs to be fixed in order to access the hard drive.
There are various mechanisms using which you can maintain the performance of the hard drive. You can run a regular check up of the hard disk health or you can use any of the inbuilt mechanisms to ensure error-free hard disk all the time. For example, you can run the drive defragmentation to optimize the hard disk performance.
On Windows based systems, drive defragmentation can be easily performed. Moreover, you can schedule the process of drive defragmentation at regular intervals. On the other hand, Mac based systems have the inbuilt capabilities to automatically defrag the hard disks at regular intervals. Such defragmentation can also be performed, using any of the special software meant for this purpose.
Various Recovery Options from Logical Corruption
Hard drive Replacement
A hard drive corruption, often leads to damage the sections of the hard drives. These sections include the sectors on which the data is written. A bad sector on the hard drive might not affect the data present on the other sectors. However, it is always recommended to have a fresh hard drive rather than fixing the damage parts and using the damaged hard disk once gain.
In addition, a temporary solution might create a future problem even more devastating than the previous one. With a new hard drive, you can ensure a more reliable product with the latest technologies to minimize the case of data loss.
Use “Master” and “Slave” Drives
If you want to keep the old drive and the data within it, you can make it as a slave drive. You can use a new hard drive as a primary hard drive and load your operating system onto it. In this way you can boot your system with the operating system loaded on to a new (master) hard drive and use the old drive as a secondary (slave) drive.
In this way you can get the access of all your data present on the hard drive. In case, there is a risk with the secondary drive, you can copy the data onto the new drive and remove it.
Recover Lost Data
In case you are using a master and a slave drive on your computer, you can recover the corrupt or damage data from the slave drive by making use of the data recovery software. The data recovery software is capable of restoring data from the damaged sections of the hard drive. The success of data recovery totally depends on the severity of the corruption and the data recovery software used to recover the data.
The steps to get data recovered totally depend upon the type of data recovery software being used. More often, such steps can be easily performed by even a novice user. This could prove out to be a great help for the people who are looking for a solution to recover data from inaccessible hard drive. If the steps are followed correctly, the data can be easily recovered, without causing any further damage to the hard drive.
