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A hard disk drive failure occurs when a hard disk drive malfunctions and the stored information cannot be accessed with a properly configured computer. A hard disk failure may occur in the course of normal operation, or due to an external factor such as exposure to fire or water or high magnetic fields , or suffering a sharp impact or ...
Also, while earlier versions of the technology only monitored hard drive activity for data that was retrieved by the operating system, this latest S.M.A.R.T. tests all data and all sectors of a drive by using "off-line data collection" to confirm the drive's health during periods of inactivity.
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Modern hard drives feature an ability to recover from some read/write errors by internally remapping sectors and performing other forms of self-test and recovery. The process for this can sometimes take several seconds or (under heavy usage) minutes, during which time the drive is unresponsive.
Power supply may be bad Long continuous beep tone Memory failure Steady, long beeps Power supply bad No beep Power supply bad, system not plugged in, or power not turned on No beep If everything seems to be functioning correctly there may be a problem with the 'beeper' itself. The system will normally beep one short beep. One long, two short beeps
On a hard disk drive, the click of death refers to a similar failure mode; the head actuator may click or knock as the drive repetitively tries to recover from one or more errors. These sounds can be heard as the heads load or unload, or they can be the sounds of the actuator striking a stop, or both.
The most common data recovery scenarios involve an operating system failure, malfunction of a storage device, logical failure of storage devices, accidental damage or deletion, etc. (typically, on a single-drive, single-partition, single-OS system), in which case the ultimate goal is simply to copy all important files from the damaged media to another new drive.
If the disk drive detects multiple read errors on a sector it may make a copy of the failing sector on another part of the disk, by remapping the failed sector of the disk to a spare sector without the involvement of the operating system (though this may be delayed until the next write to the sector).