Tips for preventing bad sectors in hard disks

1. Do not make "umpog" your hard disk at all. Siempre kasama na rito yung nababagsak yung HDD. The HDD may be mostly made of metal but you have to handle them like eggs;

2. If you dont want bad sectors, never move your PC while it is on.
Kahit na 2 inches lang ang iuurong. Never NEVER. Ito ang palagay kong
exception to the rule ?Never say Never?. Shutdown. Shutoff. Move the PC.
Then turn it on.

3. Do not make "patung-patong" your HDD, one on top of the other. Make sure they are in proper packaging (anti-static bags and clamshells or styro boxes) if you have to store them;

4. Only hold or handle your HDDs by their edges, never touch the printed circuit boards or electronic parts.

5. If you have to put the HDD down on, lay it down on an anti-static bag

6. When mounting HDDs use the proper screws (coarse thread and
shorter screw) as opposed to the screws for CDROM drives and Floppy
Drives which are fine thread, and the case screws which are coarse
thread but longer;

7. Use as many screws to mount your HDD as possible, usually 4.
Some techs will use only 3, I have seen HDDs mounted using only 1
screw. Why? the 4 screws will ensure proper heat transfer
from the HDD to the case;

8. Tighten but not overtighten the screws. Your screws are steel, the HDD case is aluminum, you are in danger or damaging the thread in your HDD if you overtighten;

9. You may mount the HDD in any way (level, un-level, upwards,
downwards, vertical) whatever it takes to make it fit your casing.
There will be no problem performance-wise.

But, mind you, if in the future say 2 years, you have to unmount and
reinstall the HDD in a configuration different to what it has been
accustomed to, the HDD might die on you just like that. Example ?
vertically mounted for 2 years, then i-reinstall mo horizontally.
Maaring pag-on mo pa lang ng PC, dedo na ang HDD. It happened to me 3X
already. Perfectly working HDD, then remounted in a different attitude,
patay. Most probably the bearings have gotten used to the old mounting
and seize up when mounted differently.

10. Keep your HDDs cool. Blow fans on them, use coolers. At the very least make sure your casing is properly ventilated. Heat shortens the life of HDDs.

11. Cables? Make sure your cables are good and connected correctly.
I have had bad cables (may gasgas or may kagat kagat ng daga o ipis)
kill HDDs one after the other. Lungkot. Akala ko sira hard disk yun
pala cable, kinabitan ko ng ibang HDD, patay din.

12. Power Supply? Make sure your power supply is up to snuff
(ibig sabihin maganda ang boltahe). This is where most HDDs fail after
serving you for a long time. Low 12-volt rails kill HDD motors. Bad 5V
kill HDD electronics.

13. Power connectors. Make sure your power connectors (those
white plugs with yellow, black and red wires) fit well. Loose connectors
provide bad power. After running your PC for a while, say 15-30
minutes, touch your connectors, if they are hot, then there?s something
loose, replace with a spare connector and label the bad connector. If
you do system checkups, it is good to take note of heat discoloration on
power connectors and replace those bad ones;

14. Brown outs do not just kill lights, they kill HDDs. Brown
outs are sometimes accompanied by bad power spikes and deadly voltage
fluctuations. If you can afford a good UPS, buy one.

15. When transferring HDDs between systems don?t just take one and install into another and fire it up just like that.
Please make sure you get into BIOS first and make sure that your new
system is set to ?auto?. If your old system detected the HDD using
manual or non-standard parameters, then duplicate the parameters first
in BIOS in the new system before booting up. You might scramble all your
data if your new system tries to read the HDD using wrong parameters.

16. If you use your PC a lot, defrag your partitions once a month. If not, a defrag once every 3 months will be fine.
For those of you who think that defragmention speeds up your HDDs
death, may I give a small explanation. If your partition is quite
defragmented, your HDD will be doing a lot of unnecessary work by
default, its head going back and forth trying to get to the different
parts of your files scattered all over your disk. Besides with a
defragmented disk, you will have a more responsive PC.

17. Install enough RAM. You dont want your HDD swapping files back and forth from system RAM and the swap file. Lots of work for the HDD, slow PC.

18. Partition your HDD. At least 2 partitions. One partition for
your Operating System. The other one for your data. This way if your OS
gets corrupted (and it happens) you don?t have to perform PC acrobatics
to get your data back. You can reformat your OS partition and be assured
that your data is safe in a separate partition.

credits to Computer Open House

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Hide important data from other users

Normally when you need to secure your important data from other users, then your first choice is to burn it on CD or put it to removable drive instead of hard drive. But imagine if your data size is more than 100 GB then it is not easy to burn it on CD. No worry, you can save your full drive from other users access using this trick.
Perform the given steps to hide your system data partition:
To enable this feature, you will need to be logged into your computer with administrative rights.
First click on Start button to open “Run” and type “CMD” (without the quotes) then press Ok button to open Command Prompt.

Now type diskpart on the blinking cursor and wait for 5 seconds to appear diskpart> utility.

 

To show the list of volume, type list volume command after the diskpart> prompt, this command will show you all system drives detail.

Now first select the volume that you want to hide, for example,

if you need to hide F drive then first type select volume 2 (in this case) and press enter button.

After loading volume, type remove letter F (in this case) to hide F drive.

But next time, when you want to unhide the D drive, just run assign drive F command after loading volume 2.

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How to repair a dead hard drive

When a hard drive goes bad, the first thing you'll probably do is have a good old curse at the platter gods for picking on you. You then might decide to have a bit of a panic when you realize that you didn't back up your files.

Shortly after sweating out a few pounds, you'll probably have a go at fixing it. Well, it's worth a shot after all. But chances are, unless you know exactly what the problem is and have the skills necessary to fix it, you're pretty much up poop alley.

If you're lucky and the disk head or motor hasn't been damaged, the problem could lie in the controller board or printed circuit board (PCB). Often, when there's a power surge or the drive overheats, it can damage the board. If this happens, then you can quite easily replace the PCB with one that is working and bring your hard drive back to life.

A common sign that a PCB has been in the wars is a scorch mark, but sometimes there are no visual cues to give the game away.

First things first

The PCB might not be the problem after all, then, but it's the one area of the drive that you should tackle first when something goes wrong. After all, a replacement PCB from a specialist like www.hdd-parts.com will set you back around £25 delivered to your door, so it's a relatively inexpensive way of fixing your drive.

If you were feeling plucky, you could just go to a data specialist and get a man in a white coat in a lab to carefully take your entire hard drive apart and put it all back together, in the hope of rescuing your drive, but you'll be looking at a bill for at least £1,000. Unless you really, really need the files on that drive, you'll avoid this route and go down the PCB road first.

Back to life

Does it really work? Well, we tried it on a drive that had suddenly stopped working one day. There were no horrible clicking sounds, it simply wouldn't power on – the thing was lifeless. So, we replaced the PCB with an identical working one and managed to get it working again.

This wasn't after trying it on many different drives – this was the first one we'd worked on, so it wasn't a fluke.

It's worth mentioning that if this works for you, and there's a pretty good chance that it will, once it's up and running again, don't get lazy and put it back in your PC. If it failed once, there's a probability that it will fail again. Our advice is to transfer all your sacred files to another drive and then bin it… or pop it in the trophy cabinet.

Step-by-step: Fix your hard drive

1. Take drive details down 

Get a replacement PCB identical to your current one, otherwise it won't work. Note down the model number (below the S/N), the P/N, the Firmware code, Date code and Site code, as well as the Main Controller IC number, which is located on the main square black chip in the middle of the actual PCB. In our case it was the six-digit code near the top, above the word 'SEAGATE'.


2. Search for it online

Go to hdd-parts.com and enter the model of the dead drive (in our case, it's the 11-digit code two lines down from the top of the drive) into the search box at the top of the page. This won't give you the exact model, but look through the list of results and find the drive that matches all the numbers you noted down in the first step. Now, buy it!

3. Check your parts

The new PCB should take about six to 10 working days to arrive through the post. When the mail man comes round, you should receive a box with a replacement working PCB inside, as well as a torx screwdriver and installation instructions – not that you'll need this last bit. If something is amiss, email the company and they will get back to you within a couple of days.

4. Remove the old PCB

On top of the PCB you'll see five screws connecting it to the hard drive. Undo them using the torx screwdriver included in the kit, making sure that you don't lose any of them. They're pretty tiny, so once you've managed to remove them all, place them into a zip-lock bag so they don't go astray if you decide to have a break between now and the next step.

5. Attach new PCB

Make sure you ground yourself – an easy way of doing this is to put on an anti-static wrist band – and then carefully take the replacement PCB out of its anti-static bag. Pop it onto your old hard drive, making sure you line it up with the original screw holes. Take the screws from your zip-lock bag and screw the PCB down, ensuring each screw is reasonably tight.

6. Try out your drive

Turn on your PC. Then connect your hard drive to your dock, plug it into the PC and power it up. If the problem with your old drive was due to a faulty PCB, replacing it should now allow your drive to be recognised properly. Access the fi les you need, then copy them to your PC. Don't attempt to use the drive once this is done: chances are it might turn faulty in the future.

credits to Nick Odantzis

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