How to Ascertain whether the Hard drive may be Failing or Faulty in your Laptop

A hard disk drive or hard drives are situated inside the laptop and is used to store Windows, your programs and your data. When a fault develops it is often difficult to be sure of the cause, this article will indicate some of the things to check to arrive at a conclusion.
You may notice any of the following that may be caused by a faulty or failing hard drive located inside the laptop:-
1. Laptop completely dead no power lights etc. Surprisingly a faulty drive can occasionally completely stop the power up of the laptop. The power light may come on; the battery light may come on. If you remove the drive and the laptop powers up to the bios screen then this would confirm that the drive has failed.
2. The laptop is very slow to power up to a Windows screen. Additionally, it may respond very slowly when you try to run a program from the desktop. The drive may be causing the slow responses but so may faulty ram, faulty CPU or faulty software, more tests would be necessary to confirm that the drive is faulty.
3. The laptop may start to power up into Windows then stop either with or without an image on the screen. Hard drives may develop ‘bad blocks’ where part of the surface of the drive medium is damaged, this can account for the stalling in the loading of Windows. Other caused of stalling may be faulty ram, faulty CPU or faulty software, more tests would be necessary to confirm that the drive is faulty
4. Most hard drives have a feature called ‘Smart’. This can give early warning to the laptop user that the drive is about to fail. The drive may apparently be operating correctly, but if a smart warning is seen then your work and data should be immediately backed up and the drive replaced.
5. Sometimes a drive becomes noisy; this may indicate that it needs replacing, although some makes are noisier than others.
6. When starting up the laptop a requester is seen indicating that scandisk is going to be run. This may be caused by the laptop detecting a possible misread of the media. The scandisk software attempts to check the full structure of the software on the drive and correct where possible. If you don’t always close down the laptop properly then scandisk may be triggered.
It is often not realized by the laptop user that the hard drive can easily be damaged by slightly bumping or banging the laptop when it is turned on. Bearing this in mind laptops should not be used on laps but on a solid surface. Also when completing work on the laptop it should be shutdown properly not just the lid closed as the method of shutdown. This is because sometimes the laptop does not complete shutdown when the lid is closed; then the laptop will be bumped around when the hard drive is still active. Once the laptop has closed down properly then minor bumps and bangs should not cause damage to the hard drive. Always close down the laptop properly, don’t force power off as this can cause hard drive errors that may or may not be cleared by scandisk.
Often, the only way to be sure that the hard drive is the cause of problems in a laptop is to replace the drive and see how the performance changes.