Com 226 comp trouble shooting II theory book

Week7
This Week Learning Outcome
To Understand


Hard Drive Failure

Hard Drive Failure – Symptoms and Troubleshooting
T
he hard-disk drive (HDD) evolved to answer the incessant demands for permanent high- volume file and data storage in the PC. Early floppy disks provided simple and inexpensive storage, but they were slow and programs quickly became far too large to store adequately on diskettes. Switching between multiple diskettes also proved to be a cumbersome proposition. By the early shard drives had become an important part of PC architecture (Fig. 17-1) and helped to fuel further OS and applications development. Today, the hard drive is an indispensable element of the modern PC. The hard drive holds the operating system, which boots the system, stores the multi-megabyte applications and files that we rely on, and even provides virtual memory for systems lean on RAM. Hard-drive performance also has a profound effect on overall system performance. As you might imagine, hard-drive problems can easily cripple a system. This chapter presents the technology and principles of hard-disk drives, and provides you with some solutions for drive testing and troubleshooting.
Drive Concepts
The first step in understanding hard drives is to learn the basic concepts involved. Many of the terms covered in Chapter 16 also apply to hard drives, but the additional performance requirements and operating demands placed on hard drives have resulted in an array of important new ideas. In principle, a hard-disk drive is very similar to a floppy drive—a magnetic recording media is applied to a substrate material, which is then spun at a high rate of speed. Magnetic read/write heads in close proximity to the media can step rapidly across the spinning media to detector create flux transistions, as required. When you look closely, however, you can see that there are some major physical differences between floppy and hard drives.

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