Hard Drive Software Troubleshooting

Hard Drive Software Problems and Solutions

If the drive CMOS settings are not correct, the drive will not boot up. Find the key combinations to access your BIOS and check the settings to see if the drive has been recognized. Select "Auto" from the main BIOS screen and after rebooting, the drive should be detected automatically. Be sure to save the changes and then reboot the computer to see if the drive works.

Computer Boots but with Many Errors or Hangs

The LBA or Logid Block Addressing settings may be set wrong when your computer have many errors, and if your computer is an older model. LBA is a method used by older PCs to support IDE hard disks larger than 504 megabytes.

Access your BIOS and check the LBA settings. If the LBA settings are not enabled, enter
the BIOS and enable your LBA.

Your Hard Drive may have an IRQ Conflict

The primary hard drive controller normally uses the IRQ or Interrupt Request Line of number 14 and if you have a second drive, it may use number 15.You may install a new device such as a modem that uses IRQ 14 by default and once installed, the may not recognize the hard drive.

The solution here would be to change the IRQ setting of the new device you installed to another IRQ. Check the manual that came with the new device for possible IRQ settings.

Your Hard Drive Device Drives Causing Problems

In Windows XP, Vista, and 7, you can view the device drivers in the Control Panel and update them if needed. If you are not sure you have the latest device drivers, perform these steps to update, especially if you operating system is Windows 7.

Click on Start, Control Panel, System, and the System Properties will appear. Then click on Hardware, and Device Manager. Click on Disk Drives and then your Hard Drive. Click on Driver and here you can Update the Device Driver. You also have the option of Rolling back to the old driver should something go wrong.

Here's How You Can Recover From a Hard Drive Crash

In addition to 'daily backup', I prefer to do a 'weekly backup' every weekend. You should use one directory on your portable computer for "long-term backup". Particularly if you often download a software and don't have any physical representative of it. Re-arrange the directory structure on your desktop computer , creating one primary root directory, with a sub- directory for every application you use to work with. The subdirectories under the root "Own" are only to take the data files associated with Winword, Eudora or any other programs that create output. Whenever you create or modify a file (whatever the file type), be sure to write/update the current date in a comment line near the top.

Finally, let's not forget that, especially in computing there is hardly anything bad that wouldn't have any positive side effect. Over time a lot of the "scrap" will assemble on your hard drive. Nowadays that's not much of a problem, just some wasted storage space. But remember the performance is diminished when the operating system has to struggle with a lot of complicated entanglements.