Hard Drive Sector Errors
Recently I had a big problem with my computer’s hard drive having sector errors, which in turn caused a lot of ordinary errors to show up. Since I could still use my computer though, I was fooled into thinking it was a virus or another form of data corruption, which led to many wasted hours of misdiagnosing.
If you ever have the same problem, you should be aware of what exactly a hard drive sector error is and what the warning signs are. So to start this lesson we will first talk about the fundamentals of a hard drive.
A hard drive is what stores all of your computers information, from the Operating System to a picture you might have taken on vacation. What happens is a circular magnetic piece of film is attached to a metal platter, and it spins it with a reading arm over head. The reading arm has a sensor on the end of it, which can read that magnetic piece of film by just being over it.
This is how the information gets stored, binary code in the form of ones and zeros are applied to the magnetic film and the arm reads and writes to it. This is what leads to the sector error problem, and is why you really have no choice but to get a new hard drive when this happens.
When the sectors that the hard drive breaks down into, which these days is hundreds of thousands or more, get damaged they can no longer be read by the arm and have no choice but to not be used anymore. This means at first your problem will be small, but over time as more and more sectors become unusable, specific data on them will be corrupted and you would not be able to store any more on that sector.
This slowly dwindles down your memory amount while at the same time destroying data. So like I tell everybody, you should always back up your data at least once a month, because you never know when this will happen. If you do backup your data, and this happens, all you have to do is buy and install a new hard drive, and then put your data on the new one.
