Disk Errors

What’s stored on your hard drive? A few years ago, whenever a house was threatened by fire or some other looming danger, residents would grab their children, pets, photo albums and a few cherished knickknacks and head for the nearest evacuation center. These days, children and pets are still the first priority but computers and laptops are the next go-to items. Not only are your precious photos all digital now but just about everything else is as well.

No one can afford to lose their data yet disk errors occur regularly. Is your backup good enough? A disk error doesn’t have to be catastrophic if you can catch it in time. Did you know that your Windows operating system has built-in utilities to check for disk errors and repair any problems it finds? It does. The error checking utility is designed to scan your hard disk for irregularities and bad sectors. If it finds abnormalities, it can move your data out of the bad areas and into good areas.

First, let’s look at a hard disk. These storage devices are mounted into a self-contained box called the hard disk drive. The drive contains a “read-write” head for transferring data to and from the hard disk. Disks are also referred to as “platters”. Each hard disk, or platter, is broken down into tracks and sectors. Sectors contain data however these sectors can go bad. When they do, you are likely to receive a disk error when trying to access a file stored here or a read error when trying to open a file.

You can use the built-in utility in Windows to check your disk for errors called “chkdsk” which is computereze for “check disk.” You can run this from the command prompt or run it from My Computer. Let’s look at using My Computer to access this disk error checking tool.

First, double-click My Computer (in Windows Vista it is simply called “Computer”) and right-click on the disk you need to check. This can be done through Windows Explorer too. Choose Properties and find the Tools tab.

You’ll see the Error-Checking area at the top. Click on the Check Now button.

Choose the option that says, “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors.” Depending on your operating system, you may need to reboot your PC because the utility will need exclusive access to your files. In Windows Vista, this step has been eliminated.

Run the disk-checking utility periodically as part of your regular computer maintenance program to ensure your hard drive’s overall health. Other steps you can take include considering third party software programs designed for checking your disk for errors and setting up an automatic schedule for all of your routine PC maintenance tasks.

Don’t forget to perform regular backups as well. You can recover from disasters if you are prepared for them. Nothing beats a good, thorough backup. If you suffer from an unrecoverable disk error, you’ll know your data can be restored thanks to your data backup. What? The backup is no good?! Believe it or not, this happens. As a last resort, you can try a data recovery program to attempt to recover your data from your failed hard drive. This is a last ditch effort and may yield results. But save yourself the heartache by doing as much as you can to prevent data loss in the first place.