Articles tagged: hard disk

How to Back Up a Machine That Won’t Boot

The rescue or emergency disk provided by many backup programs is more useful than most people realize.

How Do I Transfer My System to a Replacement Drive?

Transferring data to a replacement drive needn’t be difficult. In fact, being prepared for a transfer is a side effect of backing up regularly.

Can I Move My Hard Drive to a New Computer and Have Windows Work?

Windows configures itself to the hardware it finds — but changing everything at once by moving the system disk to a different machine might be too much.

How Do I Secure a Hard Drive Before Sending It in for Repair?

When sending your computer out for repair, you’re handing over everything on it, including your data. Options to secure a hard drive are limited.

How Long Does a Hard Drive Last?

Hard disks can last a long time, but it’s important to realize that they could still fail at any moment.

“Chkdsk Cannot Run Because the Volume Is in Use by Another Process”

Chkdsk checks your disk for errors at a low level, requiring exclusive access to the disk to do so. “Chkdsk cannot run…” means it doesn’t have the exclusive access it needs.

Restoring an Image Backup from One Computer to Another

The concept seems simple: take a system image of one machine, restore it to another, and avoid lengthy setup time. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

What’s the Best Long-Term Storage Media?

Choosing the right long-term storage media is part of protecting your data from degradation or other forms of loss. But there’s more to it than just media.

Tip of the Day: Consider Compression if You’re Low on Space

Can I Back Up Files to a Separate Partition on the Same Hard Disk?

It’s tempting to back up to a separate partition, because it’s somewhat like another disk. The problem is, it’s not. You could be risking your data.

What’s a NAS? How Do I Set One Up?

NAS, for Network Attached Storage, is a device that provides shared disk space on your network. You may already have one.

Should I Partition My Hard Disk?

Partitioning, or splitting a single physical hard drive into multiple drives, has pros and cons. I’ll look at those and make a recommendation.

Tip of the Day: Quick Format is (Probably) Enough

Is My Hard Disk About to Die?

There are signs we can use to determine if a hard drive is about to fail, but it’s also common for a drive to fail without any indication at all.

How Do I Get Data Off of the Hard Drive in a Dead Computer?

Extracting data from a hard drive in a dead computer isn’t typically difficult, unless it’s the drive itself that caused the problem.

How do I create a new partition on my hard drive?

Multiple partitions can be useful at times. I’ll show you how to create a new partition by “splitting” an existing C: partition.

What’s the Difference Between Memory and Hard Disk Space?

The difference between the various types of things we might call “memory” is a fundamental concept that’s often confused. I’ll review the basics.

Can I stop an “idle” computer from hitting the hard disk at all?

I’ll show you how to reduce the last little bit of disk activity happening on your computer, but is that really going to help?

Why Am I Getting “Open Block” Errors from My Photo Program?

This feels like a hard-drive failure to me. There are several things you can check, but the most urgent thing to do is back up!

Checking and Repairing a Disk with CHKDSK

The Windows system utility CHKDSK is a powerful and useful tool in diagnosing and repairing certain types of disk problems. I’ll review several ways to run it, and try and describe what it does.

How hard is it to change a laptop hard disk?

It ‘s impossible to say how hard it may be for any one person, but, let me go down a list of things that you need to think about it when it’s time to replace a hard drive in a laptop.

Replacing An Old Hard Disk With a Solid State Drive (SSD)

I recently replaced the primary hard drive on my primary machine with an SSD. I’ll walk you through the steps I took that made the process relatively pain-free.

How Do I Fix Errors on My Hard Disk?

Hard disk errors come from several different sources, and as a result there are several different approaches to resolving them.