How to Troubleshoot Hard Drives and SSD Failures in Windows

There are many components of our equipment that are very important, including the processor, RAM , graphics, hard disk, etc. All of them fulfill an important role in the PC and manage to improve our day-to-day experience with the computer.

In fact, those that we have mentioned could be considered as basic, not only when it comes to getting the most out of the PC, but to make it work. And it is that as perhaps many of you already know, without these fundamental elements, the computer will probably not even start up. That is why in addition to having sufficient quality, we need them to work in the best possible way.

For all this, in these same lines we are going to focus on one of the most important components that we comment on. Specifically we refer to disk drives . You can already imagine that they serve to host the operating system as such, in addition to all the applications that we install in it. But not only that, but at the same time they serve us to store all our personal data . And here we are not only talking about office documents, for example, but also great videos or thousands of personal photos.

Manage the content of your hard drives from File Explorer

To access and manage all of this, we usually make use of such a useful functionality as Windows File Explorer. To the same, among other methods, we can access from the Win + E key combination . Once we are in the window that appears, we will have a huge number of functions to manage the saved content. We are not only talking about copying, pasting or moving, but about much more utility.

And, as we said, the hard disk of our computer is one of the most important hardware components of the PC . That’s why Microsoft , as the leader in desktop operating systems, tries to help us in this regard. Thus, it offers us functions that help us to manage content, as well as to carry out proper maintenance of these units.

That hard drive to which we sometimes do not pay due attention, together with the processor or RAM, make the equipment work better or worse on a day-to-day basis. We tell you all this because a possible error in some of the disk drives can result in a PC malfunction. It may even be the case that we cannot start the system and do not have access to certain folders or files.

Backups are a lifesaver for our data

It is worth mentioning that the system itself has a function to verify if the hard drive has a problem and notify us if it is positive. This is a dreaded message that will tell us something like Windows detected a problem on the hard drive. Once we have this on the screen, the system itself will recommend that we make a copy of the files to avoid losing them.

In fact, this is a tip that we should follow even without disk errors , in order to save ourselves upset in the future. What’s more, we must know that this can be done directly from the Microsoft system. We just have to go to the Settings application and click on Update and security. In the left part of the same window that appears, we find the Backup option. We can even configure it to be carried out automatically if we wish.

Use File Explorer to check disk health

But in addition to the aforementioned backup that we are talking about, to heal ourselves in health we can analyze the state of health of the disk drives. At the same time, if we have already found the commented message, this function will also be very useful. For those of you who don’t know it, verifying the health of the disk using Windows’ own disk error checking tool is very simple.

For all this, the first thing we do is open the File Explorer and then we select the unit that we are going to analyze. Therefore we click on it with the right mouse button and then click on the Properties option and we go to the Tools tab.

In this tab that we are commenting on is where we will find the button called Check, which is precisely the one that interests us in this case. Thus, once we click on it, the internal Windows error checking will begin. This may take a while, so we leave it to finish completely. Once it has finished, the best thing is that we restart the system and check if the message with a problem on the disk no longer appears.

Assuming that the unit is in perfect condition, the same function will let us know with another informative message.

Fix a damaged hard drive from CMD

In the event that the previous step did not help, we can also use the command prompt or CMD . Here we can already use the Windows 10 diagnostic tool. It is worth mentioning that this will help us to solve possible problems that we have with the computer’s hard drive. Of course, unlike in the previous case, this is a command-based function.

Therefore the first thing we are going to need is to open a command prompt or CMD window. We do this by typing CMD in the search box next to the Start menu button. It is also recommended to run this with administrator permissions. Then we will find ourselves in front of the CMD window , where we are going to execute the order that we need at this time. Thus, in it we only have to type stordiag.exe.

At this point it should be noted that to customize the process , we can use certain parameters. Thus, to be able to consult them, we just have to type the help command stordiag.exe / ?.