How To Extend The Life Of A (Dying) Hard disk Drive

Hard disks are extremely fragile and sensitive, a slight bump or drop could damage your your hard disk irreparably. The damage to a hard disk is not limited physically, sometimes extreme use and constant power-loss can damage your hard-disk but unlike physical damage this can sometimes be repaired. In this post you can find some tips to prevent data loss through a hard disk failure and to extend your hard disk's life, whether a dying one or not. When windows freezes suddenly and does not recover even after a long time, it can be because of a faulty hard disk among many other things, but if it freezes after you got the message in the above picture it can be confirmed to be a hard disk problem.



If you have encountered a message from windows saying "Windows detected a hard disk problem" these steps will prove most useful to you.


1. Run check disk once a month,  if you have a hard disk that is already damaged i would recommend running check disk once a week because in a damaged hard disk the data can get corrupted pretty fast and if it is neglected for long windows will not boot at all. The best way to run check disk is through "Repair your Computer" option that appears when F8 is pressed and held before  windows boots. In the window that appears choose the command prompt option and type in "chkdsk /f /r c:" and press enter to start. "c" is the windows disk, if you want repair other disks too, replace the "c" with the corresponding disk letter. Or else you can schedule a disk check yourself by going to the properties of the local disk, make sure you tick both the check boxes before pressing start.

2. Disable Write Cache . Caches are used to increase the speed of data retrieval from the hard disk. But if you suffer from occasional power loss, the data will become corrupted and unreadable. Therefore it is better to disable the caches to extend your hard disk's life. Go to control panel ----->Device manager---->Under "Disk drives" double click on the name of your hard disk------> Go to "Policies" tab----->Remove the tick from "Enable write caching on the disk" and choose OK.

Note: While these steps increase the lifetime of your HDD, it may not disable the hard disk error popup window. After the popup appears five or six times, there will be an option to prevent it from coming up again.