Tech Tip of the Week

Manually scan your hard disk for problems

Hard disks are mechanical in nature and they do fail after several years of operation (or sooner if you are unlucky). To ensure that you do not lose all your data in a hard disk crash, the best way out is to back it up regularly. However, we all tend to forget to do this more often than we would like. One solution is to manually scan your hard disk for errors before it goes belly up on you. To do this, open My Computer and right click on the Hard Disk and choose Properties. Select the Tools tab and under ‘Error checking’ tick ‘Check now.’ If the disk you are checking is the only one in your PC, Windows will prompt you that it cannot scan the disk for errors right now but it would be happy to do so when the PC boots next time around. Click OK till you’re back in My Computer and shut down the PC. Boot and Windows will run Chkdsk on your drive and fix any problems (if you have so specified earlier). In this way, you’ll get a heads up before things go beyond the point-of-no-return.