Sunday, May 31, 2015

hard drive - What are the reasons for HDD failure?


I bought my PC two years ago. One week ago my system failed to boot. I just asked my friends and they said it may have been a virus attack, but two days later I recognized my hard disk was not booting. Luckily, I have a replacement warranty.


Symptoms and Problems



  • While I am playing games, my system automatically goes to a black screen and it makes some noise like "dur dur". It has happened many times.

  • One day my friend borrowed my HDD to test his system. After that, all the problems started.

  • I have the habit sleeping in between watching a movie in my room, so my PC will automatically shut down with out my attention.

  • I have never worried about viruses.


What could have damaged my hard disk? Can a virus kill a hard disk?


I can't claim again for failure, so I'd like to fix this myself.


Answer



None of those things can harm a drive. On one hand, drives do die cause its their time - drive lifetimes usually follow a bell curve - it just happens no matter how carefully you coddle your drive.


On the other hand, if the drive had been mishandled, dropped or had something else nasty happen to it - power surges, or sudden shutdowns, there can be physical damage.


Finally, bad things can happen to data, and different OSes have different modes of failure.


Generally a 'dead' drive won't show up in bios. A slightly dead drive might still have enough life in it to croak out why its dying - though SMART - you can use gsmartctl for a graphical interface to it. If its FS corruption 'only' it should show up in windows or linux - in windows under the disk management snap in, and in linux as a device.


With the first (dead) and second (slightly dead), there's not much you can do. viruses, and software related issues,would, at most,cause the third.


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