Editing Hard Drive Troubleshooting

== Steps to take if a hard drive is not responding ==

* Getting a hard drive's specifications.
** In Explorer navigate to "My Computer". 
** With the drive in question selected: '''right click''' > '''Properties''' > '''Hardware tab''' > '''All disk drives'''
** This will show the model number, which can be used to Google more detailed specifications.
* '''Reboot the computer.''' The disk is checked as part of the start up. The OS will attempt to correct any errors found on the disk.
* '''Check the disk for errors.''' 
** In Explorer navigate to "My Computer". 
** With the drive in question selected: '''right click''' > '''Properties''' > '''Tools tab''' > '''Check Now...'''
*** '''Automatically fix file system errors''' will correct many file system errors detected. This is highly recommended.
*** '''Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors''' will perform a search for areas of the hard drive that may be damaged or unusable. If found, this tool will mark those areas as "bad" and prevent your computer from using them in the future. This is a very useful feature but may extend the scan time as much as a few hours.
Click Start.

== Past experiences ==

* 7/14/2014: `Littledamienii`'s "d" drive would become unresponsive after running Windows Backup on `damien-mg`.
** Backup was backing up files on `damien-mg` to `\\littledamienii\d\shared\`.
** After a reboot, the file system is responsive again.
** Haven't determined a definitive cause for this yet.
** Steps taken so far:
*** Purchased a replacement hard drive.
*** After rebooting, copying data from the "d" drive to another computer.

[[Category:Windows]]