Hard drives are destined to fail. It’s just a matter of when. As terrifying as its sounds, it’s true. It’s scary because your entire life can be on that drive in the form of valuable documents, pictures or other data. It’s important to backup and be prepared for this fact before you boot up the computer and get the dreaded No Operating System Found error. This can be a bad error or a really devastating error. The following will help you how to tell if your hard drive has died or whether there is another reason why it is not booting.

Hard Drive Problems

With the exception of new Solid State Drives (SSD), hard drives have a lot of moving parts. Because of this, there is a lot that can fail mechanically as the result of a manufacturing defect, heat, or simply normal wear and tear. If your hard drive has a physical problem, it has failed. You can take it to a business that specializes in recovering data, but it will probably cost you more than the computer’s worth to get that data back.

The hard drive can also fail due to electrical issues, and as with a mechanical problem, it will cost a lot to retrieve the data on the disk.

Lastly, the drive can simply be corrupt, which means it cannot boot but can be repaired by either reinstalling the Operating System or running a repair install from your Windows disk.

No Operating System Found

If you get the No Operating System Found error, this means the BIOS was in the process of handing boot control over to the hard drive and its Operating System but could not proceed because it could not locate an OS. The following could be some of the reasons for this error:

* There is a disk in the CD drive, floppy drive or USB port. Depending on how your BIOS is configured, it could be trying to boot to a drive other than the hard drive. Remove all disks and try booting up again. If Windows loads, go into the BIOS and specify the hard disk as the first boot device.
* The hard drive is unplugged. Open the case and confirm both the power connection and the data connections are securely attached.
* Jumpers are not configured properly. This problem will not just happen by itself. Unless you have been changing drive configurations or have recently added a new drive, this likely will not be the problem.
* Drive does not show up in BIOS. Change the power connector from the power supply, replace the data cable and perform other steps to determine why the drive is not recognized in BIOS. If the DVD drive shows up when you swap it out with the hard drive, this eliminates the motherboard controller and cables as being the problem. The next likely reason a drive does not show up in the BIOS is because it has died.

Fixing A Corrupt Hard Drive

You can quickly fix a corrupt hard drive if you have a Windows disk. If you have Windows XP, you can proceed to the Recovery Console by pressing the R key when prompted, then type chkdsk /r from the command prompt to repair Windows. Both Vista and Windows 7 have a Startup Repair option available when you boot to the Windows install disk. Windows Vista and Windows 7 will repair the drive automatically when you click the Startup Repair link.

In conclusion, to determine if your hard drive has died, the first place to look is the BIOS. If it’s not listed there–and if you have not performed any recent upgrades–then the hard drive has probably suffered a catastrophic failure. Also, pay close attention to your computer. If it begins making grinding sounds, if it crashes frequently, or if files suddenly begin disappearing, then this can be a sign of impending doom and you should take appropriate actions to replace it as soon as possible.

source: http://www.pctechbytes.com/hardware/hard-drive-has-died

The word “disk defrag” is typically used to refer to the Microsoft Windows utility called Disk Defragmenter. It is designed to solve a problem that occurs because of the way hard disks store data.

If you have read the article How Hard Disks Work, then you know three key facts about hard disks:

1. Hard disks store data in chunks called sectors. If you imagine the surface of the disk divided into rings (like the rings of a tree), and then imagine dividing each ring into pie-slices, a sector is one pie-slice on one ring. Each sector holds a fixed amount of data, like 512 bytes.
2. The hard disk has a small arm that can move from ring to ring on the surface of the disk. To reach a particular sector, the hard disk moves the arm to the right ring and waits for the sector to spin into position.
3. Hard disks are slow in computer terms. Compared to the speed of the processor and its memory, the time it takes for the arm to move and for a sector to spin into place is an eon.

Because of fact #3, you want to minimize arm movement as much as possible, and you want data stored in sequential segments on the disk.

So let’s imagine that you install a new application onto an empty hard disk. Because the disk is empty, the computer can store the files of the application into sequential sectors on sequential rings. This is an efficient way to place data on a hard disk.

As you use a disk, however, this efficient technique becomes harder for a disk. What happens is that the disk fills up. Then you erase files to reclaim space. These files that you delete are scattered all over the surface of the disk. When you load a new application or a large file onto the disk, it ends up being stored in hundreds or thousands of these scattered pockets of space. Now when the computer tries to load the scattered pieces, the disk’s arm has to move all over the surface and it takes forever.

The idea behind the disk defragmenter is to move all the files around so that every file is stored on sequential sectors on sequential rings of the disk. In addition, a good defragmenter may also try to optimize things even more, for example by placing all applications “close” to the operating system on the disk to minimize movement when an application loads. When done well on older disks, defragmenting can significantly increase the speed of file loading. On a new disk that has never filled up or had any significant number of file deletions, it will have almost no effect because everything is stored sequentially already.

As you might imagine, the process of indivdually picking up and moving thousands of files on a relatively slow hard disk is not a quick process — it normally takes hours.

For the defragmenter to properly run, ensure you have no applications running. Typically, SYSTRAY and EXPLORER are all you need to have running to run this application. You can see the active tasks you have running by doing a “three-finger-salute” (Ctrl+Alt+Del). Disable any screen saver in use, too. The defragmenter will fail to stay running if your system is constantly accessing some other application like Findfast.exe, a resource user that automatically gets installed with Microsoft office. To prevent Findfast.exe from running at every system boot, simply delete it from your Windows STARTUP folder, or look for the Findfast icon in control panel and change its setting.

The defragmenter can take a considerable time to run, so start the Defragmenter before going out for the evening or at the end of the day, before going to sleep.

source: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question548.htm