Hard Drives

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Hard Drives. **********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

I want many to know that if you have a hard drive problem there are many approaches to replacing it yourself. For now I will discuss Serial Hard Drives in general and later approach it with the older and still used EIDE Hard Drives. First of all if you have a name brand machine that has the factory recovery disks then that's half the battle. The factory recovery disks will bring your machine back to day one, the day you took it out of the box. Most newer brand computers require that you create your own recovery disk with blank DVD's or CD's. If you have a custom built computer my suggestion is to create an entire backup of your machine to an external hard drive using imaging software like Norton Ghost, Acronis True Image or any other backup imaging software. Keep in mind to educate and read more on your own. I prefer Acronis True Image as I've been using it since version 6 of their software and also am more familiar with it. The backup should be created with a clean system which means, update and scan your hard drive for viruses, update and scan your computer for malware, clean your system with a cleaning program such as Ccleaner or another application to get rid of unnecessary files, delete all prior restore points and make sure system restore is turned on to create newer restore points in the future, perform an error check on your hard drive by doing the error checking procedure described below on this blog, defrag your computer and do your Windows updates! Once your custom machine is cleaned, updated and defragged then do your backup of your system. You can also back up your name brand machine as well but for a custom machine with no backup whatsoever, this is a must. Secondly, once the machine has a backup located then it is time to replace the hard drive. Keep in mind that some hard drives may still be readable despite the fact that they may not boot up the system anymore. Most newer computers have Serial hard drives which makes it even easier to replace as there are really no master/slave jumpers to be set. The Serial drives do have a jumper setting for the flowthrough of bits from the drive to the motherboard, but I generally don't bother with that. All that is needed to do is take out the hard drive by unplugging the power and data cables, unsecuring the hard drive from the tower, removing it and putting the new hard drive in, securing it and connecting the power and data cables back. Before doing this task make sure that your power cord to the computer is disconnected and that the speaker jack to the computer is also disconnected. Lastly, reconnect your power cord and speaker cable, locate your factory recovery disk and put the first one in the DVD Drive if it is a DVD or the CD drive if the disk is a CD. Power down your computer and disconnect everything from your computer except the keyboard, mouse, monitor and speaker cable and then wait a few seconds and then power up your computer with the first CD or DVD recovery disk in the optical drive. The computer should boot off the CD or DVD. Follow the instructions on the screen from there. If if does not boot off the CD or DVD then the boot priority will have to be changed in the systems BIOS making the optical drive that has the CD or DVD the first boot priority. This can be done by entering the systems' BIOS which is easily done by either hitting an escape key, F1 or F2, the delete key or other specific keys dependent upon the manufacturer of the motherboard in the computer. Entering the BIOS is done when the computer is first turned on and striking the key on the keyboard until a BIOS screen comes up. More on this later or you can use your favorite search engine to digest more on this topic, but for now I'm going to leave it at that. Keep in mind the recovery process may take hours, so please be patient. The following video from YouTube shows how a boot priority is changed in the PC System BIOS so that the CD-ROM is the first boot device. Keep in mind BIOS screens can vary from motherboard to motherboard depending upon the BIOS installed on the motherboard.



Set the old hard drive aside as I have another topic to discuss more thoroughly later what you can do with the old hard drive which involves USB hard drive enclosures that you can purchase to try to recover the information back if the drive is readable still. It's simply an external case which you put the hard drive in and make the connections to it and connect the power cord to the external hard drive enclosure and power it up while it is connected to a USB port on your computer. I've added a couple of videos to show how to set them up and will explain more later. The following YouTube video shows how to install a hard drive into a 3.5 inch EIDE hard drive USB enclosure. If you're old failed hard drive is still readable I normally set the jumper on the hard drive to slave before I install it in the hard drive enclosure. Note in this video he mentions leaving it set to master.



Keep in mind that Hard Drive Enclosures come in Serial for the Serial (SATA) Hard Drive Enclosures as well. They also have 3.5 inch enclosures for the 3.5 inch hard drives and 2.5 inch enclosures as well. The 2.5 inch enclosure are primarily used with laptop size hard drives. Some enclosures may have a combination or a single type of means to transfer data to your computer via the cable they use, this may be USB, Firewire or eSATA. Here's another YouTube video about hard drive enclosures:



Do not toss the old hard drive away as information is still on it and it is another means of Identity Theft. There are many ways to recover information from drives. You may find this website interesting on software called SpinRite 6.0 at this website http://www.grc.com/intro.htm This software will recover (for the most part) hard drives that have Windows, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems on them. It's well worth the read. There are other software applications and means to recover information off drives, so be careful out there when getting a hard drive replaced. If you feel uncomfortable with replacing a hard drive and know of someone who can take the hard drive out and put a new one in for you then the better. You can even do this before you take it to have some shop recover your computer. Most shops if the computer is covered under some warranty or extended warranty will want to have the old hard drive to exchange it for the new one, so you may have to follow your gut on this one.