Troubleshoot Drive Availability

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• A hard disk drive (HDD) is most likely to fail due to mechanical problems either in the first few months of operation or after a few years
• A solid-state drive (SSD) is typically more reliable but also has a maximum expected lifetime
• With any fixed disk, sudden loss of power can cause damage and/or file corruption
  • especially if power loss occurs in the middle of a write operation

Symptoms of Failing Fixed Disk

• Unusual noise (HDD only)
  • A healthy hard disk makes a certain low-level noise when accessing the platters
  • A loud or grinding noise, or any sort of clicking sound , is a sign of a mechanical problem
• No LED status indicator activity
  • If disk activity lights are not active, the whole system might not be receiving power, or the individual disk unit could be faulty
• Constant LED activity
  • Constant activity, often referred to as disk thrashing
    • can be a sign that there is not enough system RAM so that the disk is being used continually for paging (virtual memory)
    • It could also be a sign of a faulty software process or that the system is infected with malware
• Bootable device not found
  • If the PC fails to boot from the fixed disk, it is either faulty or there is file corruption
• Missing drives in OS
  • If the system boots, but a second fixed disk or removable drive does not appear in tools such as File Explorer or cannot be accessed via the command-line
    • first check that it has been initialized and formatted with a partition structure and file system.
    • If the disk is not detected by a configuration tool such as Windows Disk Management, suspect that it has a hardware or cable/connector fault
• Read/write failure
  • means that when you are trying to open or save a file, an error message such as “Cannot read from the source disk” is displayed
  • On an HDD, this is typically caused by bad sectors
    • A sector can be damaged through power failure or a mechanical fault
    • If you run a test utility, such as chkdsk, and more bad sectors are located each time the test is run, it is a sign that the disk is about to fail
  • On an SSD, the cause will be one or more bad blocks
    • SSD circuitry degrades over the course of many write operations
    • SSD is manufactured with “spare” blocks and uses wear leveling routines to compensate for this
    • If the spare blocks are all used up, the drive firmware will no longer be able to compensate for ones that have failed
• Blue screen of death (BSOD)
  • A failing fixed disk and file corruption may cause a particularly severe read/write failure, resulting in a system stop error (a crash screen)

When experiencing any of these symptoms, try to make a data backup and replace the disk as soon as possible to minimize the risk of data loss.