PROBLEM:Let’s say you are plugging happily away on an e-mail to your Aunt Ida in Minnesota and suddenly your screen goes black.You assume that your brand new monitor is not the culprit, and turn your death gaze to your still-humming CPU.You try turning off the CPU by pressing and holding the power button down, then finally give up and pull the plug. When you plug your CPU back in and restart it, nothing appears on your screen except the words “No operating system found.”Your heart sinks and you fear all is lost.But take heart, in many cases, a simple fix may solve your problems, or, at the very least, you may be able to salvage a good portion of your files.
DIAGNOSIS/SOLUTION:In this scenario, it is likely that you are looking at either corruption to your operating system software or damage to your hard drive.The first step is to run a diagnostic utility to see if you can rule out a hard drive problem. Listed below are three of the possible outcomes:
If the diagnostic utility shows no damage to the hard drive, then you are probably looking at system software corruption.The CHKDSK (check disk) utility can be run in order to look for and fix any corruption.If CHKDSK finds corruption but cannot fix it, then repair of the operating system may be done using the OS (Operating System) Install Disk, which will replace the corrupted operating system without affecting any of your existing data.A simple and relatively quick solution.
If the diagnostic utility determines that there is damage to your hard drive, you now need to determine how bad the damage is and how much of your data you can recover.If your computer sees your hard drive but cannot find data on it, it could be a partition allocation problem (in other words, the data is still there, but the computer’s filing system is messed up).In this case, tools can be used to bypass the filing system and go directly to the data on the hard drive to recover it.Another possible reason for the computer not finding your data is that one or more sectors of the hard drive are bad.Again, tools can be used to take salvageable data from the bad sector and move it to a good sector where the computer can read it.While your damaged hard drive will need to be replaced, these solutions will at least give you the opportunity to preserve as much of your data as possible.Your system, applications, and recovered data can then be reinstalled can be done manually (installing everything item by item) or via imaging.An imaging utility takes a picture of everything on your computer, which can then be transferred to the new hard drive in one step.
In the worst case scenario, the diagnostics would tell you that the computer does not even see the hard drive.In this case, your hard drive is not just damaged, but completely dead.If this happens, and you have data on your computer that you cannot live without and which you cannot easily re-create, your best bet is to send your hard drive to a data-recovery company, an expensive proposition.This type of company would remove platters from the disk and pull any available data directly off your hard drive.And, as in example #2 above, your recovered data can be transferred onto a new hard drive as part of a complete reinstall.
PREVENTION:Can you predict when your hard drive is going to fail?Sometimes.Diagnostic utilities can be set to run at regular intervals and may be able to tell you if a hard drive failure is imminent.However, it is also wise to be prepared for those times when your hard drive fails without warning.We highly recommend establishing regular backup procedures.And if the thought of daily, weekly, or even monthly back-ups is daunting to you, there are utilities available that can help you to automate and simplify this procedure, keeping your data safe and giving you peace of mind.
