MPL 1, Storage Support Page

What is a Hard Drive?

Add or Replace a New Hard Drive.

Common Hard Drive Problems.

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What is a Hard Drive?

Your computers hard drive is the main storage device.  Normally the computer will boot to your hard drive and will be named “C” Drive.  If you have additional hard drives installed they will be labeled sequentially from “C”. The hard drive or “C” drive holds all the information stored in your PC including programs, Operating systems and data that you save, and is constantly in motion.  It holds data on circular disks that are layered called platters. These platters spin at high speeds and the information on them is transferred via the actuator arm that actually touches the platters to read and write the data.  The hard drive works in much the same way as a floppy disk. Remember, the hard drive is mechanical, this means it can and will fail. It is vital that you make backup copies of your data. Once a hard drive crashes you will lose all the data.  Although it is possible to recover some if not all your data, it can be expensive.

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Common Hard Drive Problems

The most common Hard Drive problem is known as a Hard Drive or Computer Crash.  Unless you tie your computer to the front of your car it really is impossible to crash it.  The word crash simply means that your PC has stopped reading and writing data.  This may or may not be due to your hard drive.  As with any problem, you must diagnose what you can see.  Hard Drives are pretty straight forward about problems. The number one way to tell if your hard drive is trashed is to listen to it.  If you are having problems starting your computer, listen to what it is telling you. If you can hear a clanging noise from within the computer chances are it’s the hard drive. You may hear this noise at startup or during computer use. In any event it will get worse and eventually will stop responding. Another common problem is bad sectors on your drive.  Running scandisk from Windows will normally fix these and try to hide them from the computer by marking them as bad.  The only problem here is that they will, in time get worse. Once you are notified that you have bad clusters it’s time to replace the hard drive.

 

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