more on failing hard disks continued from last year
Warning Signs of Hard Drive Failure
What Are The Warning Signs of Hard Drive Failure?
While you may be able to repair software errors caused by bad sectors and in some cases you may be able to repair the bad sectors themselves, if your drive has begun to fail mechanically nothing will stop the process. Know the warning signs of hard drive failure to help prevent disaster.
So, what are the warning signs of hard drive failure?
The key is to detect the imminent failure of your drives before they give out on you and data is lost.
Let’s look at some common warning signs of impending hard drive failure:
- Frequent but irregular crashes, especially while booting up Windows®
- Frequent and cryptic error messages while performing typical activities like moving files
- Folder and file names that have been scrambled and changed
- Disappearing files and folders
- Really long wait times to access folders and files
- Hard disk is silent for a long period after you request data by opening a file or folder
- Garbled output from open files or printing
- Hard drive grinds away constantly because of noisy bearings
Can bad sectors spread? For physical bad sectors, Yes, they can spread if you continuously read and write that area, although data can‘t be written into them, the behavior of the head on how the hard drive performs actually spread their range.
*the above is adapted from uncle google*
in order to clone windows with bad sectors and use the new clone disk without reinstalling, you need to verify if windows can boot in the old system, if not, just ddrescue to external hdd. if yes as in able to boot into windows with blue screen or errors which can be repaired with windows