Cranking sound from laptop during startup is a sign of an impending disaster. Well it’s true, if the sound comes from the hard disk. I bought an Aspire S3 laptop computer as it’s handy for travel. Very sleek design and light. Everyday, I have it with me going to office and back home. I just put it on sleep mode and I’m ready to go. Open it up and I’m ready to work.
Sad story is after 9 months with very few or without shutting it down, it start to behave abnormally. The Windows 7 operating system hangs up and informs me to backup my laptop. It’s one of those system messages which is nagging to backup my data, which I haven’t done from the start. I am too lazy to use the system backup utility to do backup of my laptop. I convince my self that nothing will go wrong for a relatively new device.
HDDScan for Windows
Everything is seems too late when one fine day the laptop froze and no key works. I have to shut it down using the power on/off button. It is really a big head ache with all important files and data going with it. My friend suggested to use SpinWrite disk revival software which could revive hard disk that are “dying” in which case is the predicament that I have. Since, it’s a commercial software I went to retrieve the data using TestDisk which is an open source software.
I am glad the partition was read by TestDisk disk recovery software, even if Windows could not recognize it and says it should be formatted. Even Partition Magic recognizes it as a bad disk. Anyway, I got all the data back. But I’ve learned the lesson that timely hard disk checking should be included in regular maintenance of laptop computer. I found HDD Scan software to be a perfect tool to do the job.
HDDScan for Windows Scan Graph
The hard disk S.M.A.R.T information is provided and the surface test to verify it’s reliability is a feature I like. Have I known HDDScan software earlier, the trouble of going through data recovery to retrieve valuable information could have been prevented.