A client brought in her rather smart Compaq laptop to the surgery last week. Just out of warrant and guess what, the hard drive had headed west! She went to power on one day as usual, only to be faced with a rather worrying message that the drive was failing….. “The SMART hard disk check has detected an imminent failure. To ensure not data loss, please backup the content immediately and run the Hard Disk Test in System Diagnostics”.
Now to be fair, at least she got a warning! Often with a failure you are faced with nothing but a blank screen or, even worse, the dreaded ‘blue screen of death’ full of meaningless gibberish! Traditional hard drives are inherently delicate items and, with their moving parts and aging technological design, are simply fated to fail eventually. If you’ve been following my blogs for any length of time you’ll know that I keep banging on about the need for caution and to ensure your personal data is regularly and safely backed up.
Swopping over a laptop hard drive is not difficult. Most are easily accessible from the underside of your laptop by removing a number of screws and lifting the old drive out from its own compartment, unless of course you have an older style MacBook Pro in which case major open laptop surgery is required to get at the offending item!
Much more difficult, time consuming and expensive is trying to recover your documents and photos from a dead drive. Data recovery can never be guaranteed to be successful.
Hard drives really aren’t expensive these days, however your photographic memories can be priceless.
Go on, you’ve been warned again!
