Seven Early Warning Signs of a Hard Drive Crash

If your hard drive is having any of these seven symptoms then you must take immediate action to backup your files...


A computer's hard drive is the central storage within the system and its failure will bring all practical functions to a complete halt.

If your PC is experiencing any of the following signs of impeding doom then you must run (not walk) and grab CDs to burn backups of all your essential data.

Sign 1 - You hear high-pitched whining, loud clicking or grinding noises coming from the drive

A normally operating drive will make a smooth "whirling" sound as is spins up or down. But if a drive has a grinding or clicking sounds (the Read/Write heads scraping too close to the magnetic platters), then your drive is sick and is on the way out.

Sign 2 - You see the infamous "Blue Screen of Death", repeatedly

BSODs (Blue Screens of Death) are actually called "Stop" errors and they only appear when your Windows System is experiencing severe software or hardware issues. Often BSODs can cured with a careful "Repair Install" of the Windows operating system or by removal of a bad device driver. But if these software fast fixes don't seem stick, then your hard drive is usually on its last legs

Sign 3 - Your computer keeps re-booting on its own

I admit, I have only seen this problem a few times in my 18+ year career and in all instances it was due to hardware issues. Once it was a dust covered motherboard, and another time an overheating processor. But all the other times it was due to bad drives.

Sign 4 - Your system keeps having frequent freezes or hang ups

You are working along just fine, and then suddenly everything comes to a halt. The program freezes up on you. Your mouse and keyboard seem to stop responding. The only solution is to reboot.

Sign 5 - Error message: hard drive is not formatted

This a fun message that you will get when you start up your machine. You maybe able to restart and get it to boot into Windows a few more times but this error is "fur-sure" sign that you drive is very close to death. And by the way don't try to format the drive! You will lose all your data.

Sign 6 - Error message: boot drive or device not found or drive cannot be accessed

This is another favorite of mine. You can check the CD/DVD trays or the floppy drive to make sure no stray disks are stuck inside. You can also check the BIOS to make sure the system is booting from the hard drive first. If all these tests are no-good, then the drive is a goner.

Sign 7 - Errors: Operating system not found or Missing Operating System

This is a bad one. Even the Microsoft technichal support knowledgebase has only got a few causes for this error message. Basically your PC can no longer detect the hard drive or the drive is too severely damaged to read (DOA).

What to do if your drive has any of these symptoms:

1) First, listen up, if possible, BACKUP YOUR FILES NOW!

2) Create a boot disk and run Windows Scandisk and set it to automatically fix errors. If it finds more than a few bad sectors then see the point above

3) If possible download and use a hard drive diagnostic program. All the major hard drive manufacturers have free utilities on their websites. Repair what you can and see point 1.

RAW Hard Drive Recovery

Very rarely we come across a situation when we try to retrieve our data from our computer hard drive, but instead of data we get some error messages and the drive is displayed as RAW. In those situations, our important files and data can not be accessed from the RAW drive. 

When the hard drive becomes RAW, it might be detected by the following symptoms:

1. "Invalid media type reading drive. Abort, Retry, Fail?" Error message
2.  File names contains strange characters.
3.  Your operating system may prompt you to format the hard drive. For 
     example, Windows gives  you "Disk is not formatted. Do you want to 
     Format it now?" error.
4.  Hard drive file system is shown as RAW.
5.  "Sector not found" error message while accessing any file.

To tackle such situations, the only option we have is to go for RAW Hard Drive Recovery. It is possible with the help of Hard Disk Recovery Software which are designed in a specific manner to meet different user’s Hard Drive Recovery requirements. 

Such softwares are capable of extracting our lost, missing or inaccessible hard drive volumes/partitions and data from them. 
While selecting Hard Drive Recovery software, we should always bear in mind that not all data recovery softwares can perform RAW Hard Drive Recovery. Most of them require file system references and that are not available because the drive is RAW. 

One such Hard Disk Recovery software offered by Stellar Information Systems Limited is the ultimate solution for all your Data Loss problems. This software allows the user to get his precious data back by carrying out RAW Hard Drive Recovery in few simple steps. 

With commanding scanning abilities, it gives incredible results. This Hard Drive Recovery software is available for most of the computer operating systems including UNIX, Linux, Novell, Windows and Mac OS.