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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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or any service technician can do to fix it. Fortunately, hard drives are

designed to take a phenomenal amount of punishment without failing.

Physical problems manifest themselves in several ways: you start getting

read/write failures, the drive works properly but makes a lot of noise, or the

drive seems to disappear. You might get a failure to boot after experiencing

any of these events.

Windows will give you error messages with read/write failures. Good hard

drives don’t fail to read or write. Only dying ones have these problems.

All mechanical hard drives make noise—the hum as the platters spin and

the occasional slight scratching noise as the read/write heads access sectors

are normal. However, if your drive begins to make any of the following

sounds, it is about to die:

• Continuous high-pitched squeal

• A loud clicking noise, a short pause, and then another series of clicks

• Continuous grinding or rumbling

Back up your critical data and replace the drive. Windows comes a with a

decent backup utility, but don’t be afraid to research third-party options if it

doesn’t meet your needs. The cloud backup services are particularly nice

options because they provide off-site protection in addition to backing up

your data.

NOTE Most hard drives have a three-year warranty. Before you throw

away a dead drive, check the hard drive maker’s Web site or call them to see

if the drive is still under warranty. Ask for a return material authorization

(RMA). You’ll be amazed how many times you get a newer, and sometimes

larger, hard drive for free. It never hurts to check!

You’ll know when a drive simply dies. If it’s the drive that contains your

operating system, the system will lock up. When you try to restart the

computer, you’ll see this error message or something similar to it:

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