One of the symptoms of the fact that your hard drive began to die slowly, but surely is that the system hangs when booting. This happens for the reason that your OS did not know about bad spots. Then the system hangs. In this case, you can repair hard drives with improvised means.
So, the system hung due to a malfunction of the hard drive. The first step is to restart the download, and then the Scandisk utility will automatically turn on and attempt to repair the damage. But it often happens that such damage repair can lead to program inoperability or loss of data that was on the damaged sector. Therefore, you can make more cunning. Before Scandisk starts, you need to boot from Disk edit from under DOS. This utility will test the hard disk for errors. For hard drive repair this is the best deal now.
Most importantly, it will move data located in bad sectors to other sectors so that these data will not be lost. Then you can safely run Scandisk. But it happens that the damage to the hard drive may be too serious and all the above programs may simply not start. Then you can get out of the current situation and repair hard drives using low-level formatting. Such formatting can be done using LLF (Low-Level Format), or Zero Writes. Boot from DOS and format one of the above utilities. Both of these programs have an initial surface check function. It does not hurt to turn it on.
- Immediately warn you that utilities for low-level formatting are potentially dangerous and in some cases can lead to the final destruction of the hard disk. Since the present, high-quality formatting can be carried out only at the factory for the production of hard drives. But if the utility is suitable for your hard drive, then we can assume that the repair of hard drives was a success because in most cases, everything works as just purchased. In the most extreme case, you can break the hard drive with the Fdisk program and select a part where there are no bad sectors. Partition Magic can also be used to repair a hard disk at home, but it does not always help.
You always want to fix problems on your own, even if you are not an expert, but you can read, try. In the case when you decide to repair the hard disk yourself , you can only try this if there is duplicate information or data is not necessary. First of all, you need to clearly understand that all information from the hard drive, if you want to repair it yourself, will be irretrievably lost. An equally important point is the availability of a source of information and an Internet resource, which not only works as a hint but also specifically provides programs that, can “cure” a sick hard drive.
Symptoms of a hard drive
The fact that the disk requires repair will be clear from the hang of individual programs or all programs, including Scandisk, Norton disk doctor, etc. It is the varying degree of damage that characterizes the different ways to fix them. In the first case, restarting the computer will be enough to check the hard drive with Scandisk, which will start Windows. Except for the lost data in those programs that are hanging, and they can be reinstalled, the computer will work properly.