Computers have become an integral part of every home and office in today's fast paced world. In fact, to carry a computer with you are no more a fashion fad but a business necessity not only to keep you up-to-date but help you process many other things while still on the move. It is no surprise therefore, that we should understand some basics of our computers if we are to ensure its smooth running at all times.

As we work on our computers daily, there are many error messages that keep popping up and most of them are ignored. What we fail to understand is that these messages are indicators of a malfunctioning hard drive which could be on the verge of a crash soon. A hard drive crash will not only affect our daily duties but also cause lot of hardships through loss of important data. Some of the most common errors are, hard drive not Formatted, Operating system not found, hard drive not found, Disk failure or Disk drive corrupted, Unknown booting device etc.

Each error indicates a different problem the hard drive may be facing and most of them need immediate attention. A 'hard drive not formatted' error indicates damaged, deleted or corrupted hard drive partition. Anything from power cuts or voltage surges to viruses can cause this. Some disk partitioning utilities and software downloads or updates could also be the reason. Such a message blinking could mean some alterations in BIOS boot priorities have occurred or the hard disk has turned bad or a virus has infected certain parts of the hard drive. These symptoms should be attended to immediately, to avoid further damage to your hard drive.

Apart from such pop up images, also look out for any tell tale signs like clicking sounds that are emitted from your computer's hard drive. These sounds indicate corrupted firmware or damaged magnetic platters, affected PCB controller, misalignment of the hard drive components due to a fall and power surges. An overheated hard drive could also cause expansion of the internal components, which come in contact of each other causing the click sounds. Another reason could be a broken actuator arm that sways freely inside your CPU.

If the problems are left unattended, it would eventually cause the system to freeze or hang. A computer hangs or freezes when the user is unable to work, give any further instructions and when other accessories like mouse or the keyboard fail to navigate. A freezing or hanging computer means existence of bad sectors on your computer's hard drive making it difficult to read or surpass them. This hinders the hard drive's ability to make necessary transactions like reading files or loading programs and is not able to access other sectors without completing the given command. Though rebooting or restarting the computer may help a few times, this condition should not be left unattended to as the bad sectors may increase with increased usage causing the complete hard disk to crash.

Heed to the symptoms of your ailing hard disk and you can be guaranteed a life time trouble free computer.