Disk Failure - Some of the Causes

Hard Disk Drive Failure: The hard drive fails in many ways such as:

- head crash i.e. the read/ write heads touch the surface of the disks causing damage
- air within the sealed hard disk drive unit becomes polluted
- unexpected failure such as the operating system failing to recognize the drive
- wearing out of the surface, may be due to pollution again. The reason could be that the air filters are malfunctioning.
- Presence of corrupted sectors

Problems with other hardware: One important component of a computer is the RAM. It has been said that if something is capable of corrupting the data in RAM, it is capable of corrupting the hard drive contents. Some of the things that corrupt the RAM are a bad RAM, bad processor fan, over-clocked PCI bus, very long data cables that are in a bad condition, overheated hard drive and a non consistent motherboard, hard drive controller and processor. Failure of this hardware can lead to corruption of the data that is written to the disk.

Incorrect exits from Windows Operating System: This can occur through various situations such as the user switching off or resetting the computer, if shutdown process fails, if there is a power cut and the computer resets itself, or if the computer freezes and/or locks up so that shutdown is impossible. The type of data corruption that will be experienced here will affect the sane file operations. The damage caused could be incorrect free space count, lost clusters and possibly incorrect file lengths.