Hard drives suffer from the same problems as floppy drives; however, the fix is different. A hard drive cannot be aligned mechanically in the field. And hard drive is a sealed unit that’s assembled in a clean room. Never remove the cover of a hard drive. Dust particles in the normal environment can destroy a hard drive. The heads of a hard drive skim across the disk surface at less than the thickness of a human hair. A small dust particle appears as a mountain to a disk head.
Reformatting the hard disk
As the drive ages the head actuator gets out of alignment data and formatting information. To rely on hard drive a low level format must be performed. Low level formatting rewrites the track and sector information and will compensate for head actuator where. Unfortunately, all program data will be lost, plus a special program like SpinRite or Norton Utilities is used.
Utility programs are available to perform a low-level format, but most hard drive controllers also provide this feature and the controller bios. Before you perform this procedure, back up all data on the hard disk, this procedure will erase everything on the drive.
After low-level formatting, run the DOS program FDISK. FDISK partitions, or divide the hard disk for use with DOS or another operating system. After FDISK is Ron, have level format must be performed. This is accomplished with a DOS format command. After reformatting, all software must be reinstalled. Before reinstalling software, check the disk for bad sectors. Hard drives can fail just when you need them, so always make backup copies of your software and data and recommend this practice to your cost.
Bad sectors and file fragmentation
Bad sectors are another problem that hard drives experience. If a section of the magnetic media becomes unreliable, data stored there becomes corrupted. This can lead to program crash, or data loss. Many commercial programs such as SpinRite, Norton Utilities, and PC Tools have programs that can search a hard drive and find and tag bad sectors. Once tagged, the sectors will not be used again. If bad sectors occur in the boot record area of the disk, the drive may become unbootable, or unable to load the operating system. The drive can still be used to store data but cannot be used to boot the operating system.
Another problem is file fragmentation. The data is added to the disk distorting the available space on the desk. Often, the available space is not in contiguous sectors. As files are written and deleted the available space become scattered around the drive. When a file loads, the drive head must search around the final the data. This causes wear and tear on the drive increases program loading time. Commercial programs such as Norton Utilities, PC Tools, and SpinRite also provide file defragmentation program.
If hard drive becomes unusable, commercial software may be used to recover the data. Software cannot recover the data, commercial recovery and refurbishing services are available. Please contact your local Cincinnati Computer Repair for any additional questions.