First post in the Spring! Been a long winter!

This week in the troubleshooting world I will be discussing how to troubleshoot a computers hard drive.

A hard drive is one of the most important pieces in a computer, almost everything you have on your PC is saved or stored here so what do you do when something is going wrong and you don't want to lose anything valuable!

Well, like always, I stumbled across a VERY good approach on how to fix a hard drive.

Here is the website if you would like to visit it but I will post the steps here, the website is a very good site to few other things too! So explore, have fun and be careful! 

Troubleshooting a hard drive

Steps:

1. Physical connectivity—Is the drive receiving power? Is it plugged into the PC by a correctly connected ribbon cable? For IDE drives, are its jumpers set correctly? Or with SCSI drives, are its SCSI termination and ID set correctly?
2. BIOS setup—Does the BIOS see the drive?
3. Viruses—Does the drive contain any boot sector viruses I need to remove before continuing?
4. Partitioning—Does FDISK find a valid partition on the drive? Is it active?
5. Formatting—Is the drive formatted using a file system that the OS can recognize?
6. Drive errors—Is a physical or logical drive error causing read/write problems on the drive?
7. Operating system—Does your OS have a feature that checks the status of each drive on your system? If so, what is that status?