Does the hard disk light burn and no longer flicker like it used to?

Hard disks are electromagnetic devices which are design to read data really quickly. Some HDD's move the internal platters at 5400 rpm, and some even faster at 7200 rpm. Depending on the size of the disk, the HDD will have more than one platter which spin in unison where read/write heads float over the platters to read the information that is at a certain sector.

When a hard disk is about to fail, these platters slow down enough until the data is read, then start to spin back up to their original designed speeds to read other data. Sometimes the data is unreadable or only readable at a very slow speed, and that's why you find that your hard disk light appears to burn amber, green or red.

If that is the case, you will need to start looking for a replacement drive. You'll find that the longer you keep a drive which is failing the more information you will start to lose and Windows (or any other operating system) will start to behave erratically.

In order to test to see if a hard disk is starting to fail, you can download a linux distribution which is called Ultimate Boot CD, this clever linux collection of tools includes a low level hard disk checker called ViVard. ViVard scans each sector until it finds something bad with that sector. If the sector is bad, the program subsequently marks it as being bad, and continues reading until it has completed the entire hard disk.

This program tries to reallocate the data that resides at the bad sector to move it to a more safer region of the disk. Generally you can fix an ailing operating system by running this tool, but it's best to get our data recovery geeks on the Sunshine Coast to replace your desktop or laptop hard disk.

Buying a new desktop or laptop hard disk is quite easy and in order to make a clone of the information from an old failing hard disk you can use a tool like Norton Ghost or even a free linux version called CloneZilla.