There are few things more unsettling than a hard drive failure. One minute you're working away, or saving photos and videos of loved ones; the next, you may be unable to access some or all of your precious data. To make matters worse, you might not know how to fix a broken hard drive.

Fortunately, there are built-in tools designed to fix a crashed hard drive, though the downside is that they can be limited in functionality and difficult to use. This article provided by tools discusses effective methods for repairing a crashed hard drive, including the causes of hard drive failure.

What is a Hard Drive Failure and What Causes It?

Hard drive failure is a common term used to describe a situation where a hard disk becomes damaged, resulting in the loss of some or all of the data it stores. Hard disk drives usually have several moving parts. The disks and read/write heads are perhaps the most crucial components within.

Over time, due to normal wear and tear, the read/write head can move closer to the platter. When they come into contact, you experience a “hard drive crash.” The main causes of hard drive crashes include logical failures, physical damage, or firmware issues. These include:

• Mechanical damage to the hard drive.
• Electrical damage caused by power surges.
• Thermal damage due to overheating.
• Water damage.
• Bad sectors on the hard drive.
• Dropping the hard drive to the ground.
• Firmware or manufacturer defects.

Read on to learn the signs of a failing hard drive and how to fix a hard drive failure.

What are the symptoms of a hard drive failure?

One of the most frustrating things about hard drive failure is that it can happen suddenly and without warning – especially when you're in the middle of an urgent or important task. Here are some signs that your hard drive might be failing:

Somatic symptoms

• Noise from the hard drive. Unlike the constant hum of a device's fans, a physically damaged hard drive will make uneven sounds, like something knocking or pieces crashing into each other.
• The hard drive is overheating.
• A terrifying blue screen of death.
• Your device won't turn on.

Logical symptoms

• Corrupted files, data, or folders that keep reappearing on your device.
• Unexplained system shutdowns and error messages.
• Your system is running significantly slower than usual.
• Missing/failure to start errors.

These could all be signs of a failing hard drive. Share this article on your social media to help others recognize the signs, too.

How to Handle a Damaged Hard Drive

Hard drive failure can mean losing many precious moments shared with your family, friends, or colleagues or not being able to meet your deadlines. So, what can you do if your hard drive fails? In this section, you will find possible solutions to a failed hard drive. We will discuss both physical and logical solutions.

1. Solutions for a Physically Damaged Hard Drive
2. Solutions for a Logically Damaged Hard Drive

How to Fix a Physically Damaged Hard Drive

While physical drive failures are less common than logical ones, the damage they cause is typically more widespread and severe. This section will go over how to deal with physically damaged drives.

Solution 1: Check if the hard drive is still usable

This is a preliminary step to determine whether or not your hard drive is damaged, and to what extent. You can use any number of tools to do this, but you can also use the built-in hard drive checker in Windows or Mac. Here's how:

For Windows users

Step 1: Press Windows key + R simultaneously, type "cmd," and press Enter.

Step 2: Type “wmic diskdrive get status” and press Enter.

If the drive is OK, CMD should return an “OK” status. If it's failing, you might see “Pred Fail.”

For Mac users

Step 1: Find Utilities in the Applications folder on your Mac.

Step 2: Select the disk that you believe is failing, and click "Info." If you see a message that says "S.M.A.R.T. status: Failing," the drive is irreparable. If you don't see this message, you can use Disk Utility to try to repair the drive.

Solution 2: Get the data and back it up elsewhere

If you find unfixable damage on your hard drive, the next logical step is to recover data from the damaged HDD and back it up to another storage device. You can use an external hard drive, cloud storage, or third-party backup and recovery software like the Todo Backup tool.

To seamlessly transfer data from the failed hard drive, you can use a third-party tool like MiniTool Disk Copy to easily and quickly copy data from one hard drive to another.

Solution 3: Repair or Replace the Hard Drive?

Most manufacturers include some hard drive recovery features in their devices. However, these built-in utilities have limited capabilities and may not always solve the problem. Disk Clone is the safest, most efficient, and simplest tool for repairing or replacing a failed hard drive.

This user-friendly PC cloning software ensures that you can easily replace a failed hard drive and clone all your important data. The tool lets you copy essential data from the failed drive, transfer it to the new one, and even clone a drive with bad sectors using its sector-by-sector cloning technology.

Main features of the hard drive duplicator:

• Create a hard drive clone for instant backup and recovery.
• Upgrade your hard drive to a larger one without losing data.
• Easily copy data from a failed hard drive.
• Upgrade HDD to SSD without reinstalling Windows.
• Produce a WinPE bootable media to install an OS on a crashed computer.

Don't lose your hard drive data. Download and install a disk cloning tool now to satisfy all your data recovery, hard drive repair, or replacement needs.

Advance notice:

• "Sector-to-sector copy" requires the target disk to be the same size or larger than the source disk. Uncheck this if you want to clone a larger hard drive to a smaller one. • All data on the target disk will be completely erased. Proceed with caution.

Step 1: To start copying/ cloning an entire disk to another, select the disk in Disk Mode, and click Next.

Step 2: Select another disk as the target disk.

Step 3: Check the disk layout of both disks. You can manage the target disk's layout by selecting "Fit to disk," "Same as source," or "Edit disk layout."

• "Auto-adjust disk" makes some modifications to the manual layout, in order to optimize it. • "Copy disk as is" makes no changes to the target disk, which will have the same layout as the source disk. • "Edit disk layout" lets you manually adjust/move the partition layout of this target disk.

Check the “Perform this check if the target is an SSD” option to optimize performance on your SSD.

A warning message appears, telling you that your data will be lost. Confirm this by clicking OK, and then click Next.

Step 4: Click “Proceed” to officially commence the task.

How to Fix a Logically Damaged Hard Drive

Since it's the most common type of hard drive failure, it's always useful to know how to fix a logically damaged hard drive. Fortunately, since this kind of damage is caused by user or software error, you're more likely to be able to recover your lost data or fix the logical damage to your hard drive. This section will cover methods for addressing logical damage:

Solution 1: Format the Partition

Since logical failures are hard drive failures caused by user error or manufacturer defects, you can fix these issues by formatting the partition. Both Macs and Windows computers have built-in disk repair utilities that you can use. Here's how:

For Windows users

Step 1: Press Windows + X simultaneously, and click on “Disk Management.”

Step two: Select the drive you want to format, right-click on it, and choose “Format.”

Click Format.

< b >Step 3:</b> Follow the wizard to format the hard drive to the default settings.

For Mac users

Step One: Open Disk Utility on your Mac, and take note of the name of the hard drive you want to format.

Step 2: Click “Erase,” and then enter a name for the drive in the “Name” field.

Click Erase.

Step 3: Click on “Format” to choose the file format you want. When the conversion is done, click “Finish”.

Fix 2: Run CHKDSK

< a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHKDSK" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">CHKDSK is a built-in Windows utility that can check the capacity and integrity of your hard drive. Here's how:

Press Win+R, type "cmd", and press Enter.

Step 3: Wait for the program to finish. If everything went well, you shouldn't have to do anything else. However, if Chkdsk finds errors, you can deal with them using any of the following Chkdsk variants as needed. You can find detailed descriptions of what they do below:

• Chkdsk /f – Fixes file system errors on the hard drive.
• Chkdsk /x – Dismounts the drive.
• Chkdsk /r – Scans for and attempts to recover bad sectors, and relocates data from them.

The CHKDSK command scans a hard drive for possible errors, while variants of the command such as /f, /x, and /r address specific repair issues with the hard drive.

Final Arbiter

A hard drive crash is a frustrating thing. However, you can recover data using built-in utilities and third-party tools like Disk Utility or Disk Copy, which are more convenient and effective. By now, you should know how to fix a crashed hard drive and how to tell if your hard drive is failing.

While you can always rely on built-in utilities to fix a crashed hard drive, other verified alternatives like a disk cloning tool can help you move your data to a safer location. This tool ensures that your disk has backup and recovery options in case of a hard drive failure. Plus, it can also help you clone hard drives of different sizes. Download, install, and start using a disk cloning tool to fix your crashed hard drive now!

Frequently Asked Questions About Fixing a Crashed Hard Drive

Here are some of the most common questions about how to fix a damaged hard drive:

What is a hard drive head crash?

Hard disk head crash refers to the situation where a hard drive's read/write heads come into contact with the spinning platters, scratching their surface and causing permanent damage to the magnetic medium.

What happens when a hard drive fails?

When your hard drive fails, accessing the data stored on it becomes difficult, and thus, you are likely to experience data loss. Without efficient data recovery software, retrieving that data might seem impossible.

How to fix a hard drive using CMD?

You can use CMD to fix a hard drive, provided the damage is logical rather than physical. Here's how to do it:

Step 1: Go to the Search bar, type Command Prompt, and select Run as administrator.

Step 2: In the Command Prompt window, type the following command and press Enter (replace C with the correct drive letter for your computer):

This is a command for the Windows operating system used to check for disk errors and fix them. In American English, it would be: chkdsk C: /f /r /x This command translates to: - /f: Fixes errors that are found during the check. - /r: Locates bad sectors on the disk and attempts to recover readable data. - /x: Forces the volume to dismount if necessary, even if there are open files, to perform the check.

This will scan your hard drive for any possible errors and fix them.