Every computer has hard drives used for various purposes. No doubt computer hard drive is really very important for the users. But many a times computer hard drive stops working or acting up. This can lead to the loss of data, information, time and money. So if you have a computer at home, you should know how to diagnose the problems related to hard drives and the symptoms related to them. If you are well aware of the problems related to computer hard drive, their causes, symptoms and how to make it working again, it will really prove handy to you.

Generally, the surest indication of a major problem in the system is when you write some data to the disk and want to retrieve it back later on but an error appears while doing so. You may find small amounts of records missing or the data may take the form of gibberish. Remember that if this happens in more than one program, it may lead to disk failure later on in near future.

To cure this problem you can reformat the drive, after that re-install the OS and all other required programs. But sadly, this will not correct the main cause of the problem and may occur as a fatal one in future.

Computer hard drive is often held responsible for various strange noises that you hear. In many cases, these noises do not come from the drive, but from a case fan or power supply fan. If you find that your computer hard drive is working too much or always sends data to and from RAM, the problem is not with your drive. It means your computer hard drive needs more RAM.

There are various reasons for the slow-down of your computer hard drive. It won't lead to disk failure but can be provoking for many of you. The best and foremost way to deal with this problem is drive fragmentation. It is quite easy to de-fragment a drive in XP and Vista as it requires few mouse clicks.

Another important cause is the amount of data stored in the hard drive. You need to keep in mind that the more data you have on disk, slower is the retrieval process. So you should either remove unwanted files or just add another drive. Slow computer hard drives can also be an indication of viruses. Hence a good security program is needed to scan your drive.

In the end, it is recommended for the regular users that they should be familiar with the basic problems related to computer hard drive and how to solve them for better utility.