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How to Fix Hard Drive Errors and Slowdown

By Gaelim Holland

People store more information on their hard drives than ever before. It's simple, consumers demand more space and the hard drives companies have responded by producing massive 500 GB drives that are fast enough to spin at speeds of 10,000 RPM. However, large high performance hard drives require more maintenance than smaller ones.

Let's take a look at how your hard drive is structured. The hard consist of a series of circular tracks called disks. Each section of a disk is split up into pie shaped sections called sectors. These sectors store data magnetically. You may have seen errors that indicate errors in sector X or Y. These occur when the electrical motor sends the central spindle to a section of the disk that cannot be read. In this case, you may be able to fix hard drive errors to allow the section to be read. This article hopes to aid you when you need to an easy way to fix hard drive problems.

1. Check Your Hard Drives Health

An easy way to find out how to fix hard drive failure is to run the CHKDSK, Check Disk, utility. This is a Windows application that allows you to scan your hard drive for errors. Often using this utility alone will allow you to fix hard drive problems and restore the hard drive to its peak performance. This works by marking error zones and instructing your computer to skip over or repair them.

Here is how:

1. Open the "Computer" folder.
2. Select your hard drive, right click the hard drive icon.
3. Choose "Properties".
4. Click the "Tools" tab.
5. Click the "Check Now" button.
6. For a thorough repair click "Automatically fix file system errors" and "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors"
7. If you see new dialog window, click "Schedule disk check" to start.

You should run this utility every three months in order to fix hard drive errors and avoid slow down of your hard drive.

2. Organize Fragmented Data

The next order of business is to fix hard drive problems by organizing the data on your hard drive. You load an mountain of data onto your hard drive every time you use Windows. Your operating system does a good job of organizing this data. However, its not a perfect system. As a result, the data you add often is placed in an inefficient locations on the drive. This is known as fragmentation. So, you must take steps to defrag the data to fix hard drive poor performance problems. If you have registry errors, you may need to clean them to organize your hard drive efficiently. The defragment may cluster error filled registry data with clean data in your registry which can cause hard drive sluggishness.

How to defragment:

1. Open the "Start" Menu.
2. Click on "Computer".
3. Right Click your C: drive or your hard drive image.
4. Scroll down to the "Properties" Click.
5. In the Properties Menus, Open the "Tools" menu.
6. Choose "Defragment Now".
7. In the Disk Deframenter menu. Click on "Defragment"

3. Take Out the Trash

Now that your files are in order and you have enabled your computer to fix hard drive errors, its time to clean up your newly defragmented data. All files are stored in one or more places on your hard drive. Old version of this data is often compressed and stashed away. However, when your computer or registry needs a file its must locate all version of the file. This makes the ability to fix hard drive slowness more difficult. However, Microsoft has developed a wonderful tool that allows you to clean up unnecessary compressed and temporary data. In turn, allowing you to clean and fix hard drive slowness cause by inefficient data.

Here is how:

1.Click "Start".
2. Choose "Programs".
3. Open "Accessories".
4. Choose "System Tools".
5. Click "Disk Cleanup".

All in all, these few steps should allow you to fix hard drive problems and speed up the performance of Windows. When it comes to hard drive, "the bigger the better" is the name of the game. However, "with great power comes great responsibility" can also be applied.

For more speed tips and to solve other common PC problems visit: How to Speed Up My Computer?

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