Have you ever found that your computer won’t do what you tell it to do; at least not properly? Maybe it tells you that it is unable to do things that it’s always done before? Maybe it finds errors both on the hard-drive and also online which just don’t seem to make sense. When you run a program there may be certain aspects of that program that don’t run properly. Perhaps program icons and toolbars are missing, or possibly the program crashes for no sensible reason half-way through? More than likely you’re finding that the problem is worsening over time too?

This type of behaviour, along with others, could quite easily mean that your hard-drive is on its way out. If you don’t have a backup made by this point then it may be that it’s not possible to make one as the hard-disk-drive is too far gone. It’s worth a try though, if nothing else. – This is yet another reason why you should always have a recent backup on hand, which is updated regularly. If you don’t bother to back up your data then the question isn’t whether you’ll lose it or not; the question is when you’ll lose it.

The type of behaviour I stated above is only one type of behaviour resultant from a hard-drive starting to fail; and whatever the symptoms, they can creep up on you over hours, days, weeks or months – or they can happen suddenly.

All may be far from lost, however: There are a number of courses of action you can take. They may work, they may not, depending upon the state of your disc: -

There are different kinds of data error that can occur on a hard-drive:

1) Errors in the data written to the disk. The disk itself is fine: The data on it has somehow become corrupt.

2) Data errors caused by errors in the magnetic media of the hard disk itself. These errors can usually be repaired by software. These types of errors can manifest in exactly the same manner as the data errors described above and below.

3) Errors caused by physical failure of the magnetic coating on the disc platters, collapse of the platters and/or their bearings, or electrical failure of some sort. These errors would normally in most cases require you to replace the drive.

All three of these types of error can result in data corruption, an operating system that won’t boot, or a file that reports some kind of error(s). – So how do you know which kind of errors they are? Initially you don’t know one way or the other; but there are diagnostic processes you can run which might well fix the error(s); from which you can ascertain what sort of errors they were.

Use Windows Tools First

From Windows 2000 onwards, every Windows installation has the CHKDSK command line utility. – So open a command prompt, (Start>Run, and type “cmd” ¬) and type “chkdsk /r”

CHKDSK is verifying .…..

The primary function of chkdsk is to check for problems in the file system. – It checks for errors in the data on the disk. If there’s a problem in the file system then chkdsk /r will attempt to remedy it.

C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>chkdsk<drive letter>: /r
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is <volume label>.CHKDSK is verifying …

The "/r" parameter tells chkdsk to "Locate bad sectors and recover readable information". "Bad Sectors" can happen for a number of reasons, and chkdsk will attempt to identify them, mark them as bad so that they don’t get used again, and move any data that has not been corrupted to other sectors.

Chkdsk /r can take a while to complete. – Quite a long time in many cases.

If problems persist having run "chkdsk /r" then I suggest running a program called SpinRite.

SpinRite is a paid-for program by Gibson Research Corporation, owned and operated by Steve Gibson. It focuses upon all the areas of the disc’s magnetic surface that are able to be recovered by software processing, rather than the file system itself and any corresponding errors. SpinRite won’t fix file system errors; which is why we ran chkdsk first.

SpinRite isn’t interested in what type of file system is being used. It looks at the individual disc sectors and checks that each particular sector is readable. If it isn’t then there is a good chance that SpinRite can fix it. It runs intense data analytical routines in order to recover data from dodgy sectors, before attempting to repair that sector. It’s not infallible; and in some cases certain sectors are nevertheless irretrievable despite SpinRite’ s best efforts. – In which case that sector is doomed. – All the same, that’s only a single sector of an entire disk; so although the sector in question may be a write-off, the rest of the hard-disk may be still usable. – At least in parts, in a very worst-case scenario.

If SpinRite reports that a large number of sectors are unrecoverable; whether or not the drive appears to be otherwise working properly; it may be time to replace that hard-drive completely. If you’ve committed the carnal sin of not backing up beforehand then I pity you, but every source of computer information worth it’s salt, particularly on the internet, will have been nagging you to do so since time immemorial. – Therefore if you ignored that advice regardless then you only have yourself to blame. You’ll have to just recover what data you can and replace the drive.

It may be an idea, having recovered as much data as is possible, to ghost the drive image and replace the drive with a fresh one before restoring the image to the new drive.

Chkdsk and SpinRite in combination will greatly increase your chances of recovering data; but even then they’re not infallible – Which is why, and I’ll say it again, it’s always of paramount importance to have a recent backup to hand.