For the most part, hard drives either work or they don't; aside from a few minor annoyances, you won't spend a lot of time tinkering around with them. When a hard drive does fail, however, you'll want to rescue your data as quickly as possible.
My PC Thinks My Hard Drive Is Smaller Than It Is
If you've installed a hard drive that's larger than 137GB but you can't get Windows to recognize more than 137GB, you need to upgrade your hardware, your BIOS, your operating system, or possibly all three. Check with your PC or motherboard manufacturer—not the BIOS manufacturer—to see if your BIOS version supports big hard drives. If it doesn't, look for a BIOS upgrade that adds big drive support.
- First, find the version number of your PC's BIOS (start your computer and watch the screen; the BIOS number should be one of the first things displayed). Then check with your PC manufacturer to find out if your current BIOS supports hard drives larger than 137GB. If not, there may be a BIOS update that will. Check your manufacturer's website for a BIOS update.
- You may also need to update Windows XP. Only Windows XP with Service Pack 1 or later will recognize 137GB and larger hard drives.
- Even if the preceding two conditions are fulfilled, your computer still may not recognize large hard drives. If your computer was manufactured more than three years ago, it may not have the appropriate hardware to run large hard drives. In this case, you can circumvent the BIOS problem by adding an ATA-6 host controller card to one of your PC's expansion slots and attaching your hard drive to the new controller card. The Maxtor Accessory PCI Card UDMA 133 (www.maxtor.com), for example, can be purchased for less than $30.
Recover Data from a Damaged Hard Drive
Sometimes when a hard disk starts to fail, you still have time to rescue your data. Follow these rules.
- Don't run Disk Defragmenter or any hard disk maintenance utilities. These programs can scramble or damage your data, making it harder for you or a service to recover it.
- Don't waste time. As soon as you suspect there's a problem with your hard drive, start copying important files to a safe storage location like a CD-ROM, floppy disk, or secondary hard drive. If your hard drive has more than one partition, don't copy data to the second partition; there's a good chance it will fail as well. For the technically savvy, SpinRite from Gibson Research (www.grc.com) is an excellent data recovery software program that offers the technically proficient user a good chance of recovering at least some—and quite possibly all—the information trapped on a bad hard drive. At $90 it's expensive, but it's a bargain compared to the alternative: a data recovery service.
- If you have data that you absolutely must recover from a dead hard drive, you can take your hard drive to a data recovery service like Ontrack Data Recovery Services (www.ontrack.com). These services can take weeks to produce results and cost hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to recover.
Properly Disconnect External Hard Drives
If you frequently connect and remove an internal hard drive with a USB 2 or Fire Wire connection, make sure Windows is ready to break the connection. If a software program is still using the external hard disk and you suddenly disconnect the drive, important data files can be lost or corrupted. Here's how to safely remove an external hard drive or any hardware device that uses a USB 2 or FireWire connection.
Double-click the Safely Remove Hardware icon in the Windows system tray at the lower-right corner of your computer screen (see Figure 1).
Select the drive or device you want to disconnect from the list and click Stop (see Figure 2).
Windows will display a message in the lower-right corner of your screen confirming that it's all right to remove your drive (see Figure 3).
- Turn the driver device off and then disconnect it from the computer.
Windows Keeps Changing My Drive Letters
When you add and remove hard drives, optical drives, or other storage devices from your PC, Windows may automatically adjust the drive letters assigned to those drives or the partitions on those drives. This can be a problem if you have software that expects to find files stored under a specific drive letter. Here's how to permanently assign a drive letter to a specific device or partition:
- Go to Start and right-click My Computer, click Manage, and under Computer Management and Storage click Disk Management.
In the right-hand pane, right-click the drive you want to change. You can select either the drive's bar representation at the bottom of the pane or its drive letter that's listed at the top. Right-click Change Drive Letter And Paths.
Click Change, and then click Assign The Following Drive Letter. Choose the letter you want to assign from the pull-down menu on the right and click OK.
