3 Major Hard Drive Failure Symptoms and What They Mean

A lot of the time, the term "hard drive crash" is used by computer repair companies to refer to a number of different types of hard drive failure, when actually it refers to a specific problem. Similarly, many computer users will say that their drive "just died." However, there's a lot more to it than that. Here are three common hard drive failure symptoms with a look at the components that cause them.

The hard drive isn't recognized in the BIOS - This could be a problem with the hard drive's electronics, since the electronics typically are the first point of interaction with your computer's motherboard, but hard drives also have firmware information on the platters, so you might have a problem with your drive's read/write heads. This is especially likely if your hard drive is displaying in the BIOS, only with the wrong drive information (i.e. you've got a Western Digital 80GB and your computer thinks it's a Western Digital 500GB).

You might also simply have a problem with your computer's motherboard. A good first course of action would be replacing the relatively inexpensive IDE, ATA, or SCSI cable and switching the drive to a different power plug.

Clicking, whirring, and other physical noises - Any kind of a clicking, screeching, or otherwise mechanical noise a drive emits is usually a fairly solid symptom of a head crash. The heads are either unable to find a particular group of sectors that they're looking for (this is characterized by an intermittent clicking sound), they've become misaligned and are making contact with the platters (screeching), or they're locked up against the platters. In any case, you definitely don't want to continue to run a drive with possible head issues, so turn it off and leave it off!

It's interesting to note that while mechanical sounds usually indicate a physical problem, head crashes can be caused by electronic issues (and vice versa), so don't assume that your drive only has the one issue.