This is a fairly typical situation as we will tell you below and it usually happens on PCs that still use a mechanical hard drive, since as we are going to tell you right away this piece of hardware is the culprit of this evil. which is much more common than you might think. If you see yourself in this position, we’ll tell you what you can do about it.
Slow PC and hard drive missing, what’s wrong?
The main symptom that you will find if you are suffering from this problem is that the computer takes a long time to start the operating system. Once started it will work relatively smoothly and even though it is a gaming PC you won’t notice that the games run slower. You will feel the slowness especially when starting the computer and when you want to open a Windows Explorer to view your files, at which point the loading time can easily be multiplied by 10 (or even more).
Precisely when you access the Computer in Windows 10, you will be able to verify that a hard drive has disappeared or that it appears with a capacity that is not the one that corresponds to it (for example, a hard drive of 500 GB could appear as having only 5 GB in total). Also, if you try to access this unit, you will receive an error that will indicate that it is unreachable, and as you will already assume, the problem is that hard drive is not working well.
is a problem it won’t happen to you if you only have SSDs in your team, and in fact only occurs when a mechanical hard drive It is connected but it is not the system disk, but a pure hard storage device which serves as secondary. Also, this will only happen as we told you if you don’t have any programs installed on the device (i.e. you only have it for storage or for games) because otherwise it will give you problems and errors when these programs remain inaccessible to the point where the computer may not even be able to start the operating system.
The whole system slows down, especially the startup of the PC, as the operating system tries to check and access data to which it does not have access since, as we have already told you, the hard drive does not work well but Windows He “does not know” and continues to insist and persist in trying to verify this data.
Is there a way to “resuscitate” the hard drive?
So far, we have already verified that the hard drive is not working well or that it has been directly damaged; If the hard drive is dead and it is not even listed in the storage units (you can see this by right-clicking the Start button -> Disk Management), you cannot do much, because in all probability it crashed in a strict fashion. However, if the system continues to detect the unit, there are some things we can do, although it is true that at this point the best solution is to replace the damaged unit with a new one.
The first thing to do when trying to resuscitate a problematic hard drive is to use the Windows CHKDSK tool; To do this, open a Command Prompt window as administrator (Right click on Start -> Command Prompt (administrator)) and run the following command (replacing X with the drive letter of the hard drive you problematic) :
chkdsk X: / F
This utility will check your hard drive for errors and, if they are recoverable, correct them automatically. However, it is likely that the system detects that the hard drive is in use by other processes and indicates that it cannot be executed at that time. But don’t worry, because it also tells you if you want chkdsk to run on the next system boot. So answer yes by pressing the Y key, then ENTER, then restart the computer so that the test can begin.
The testing process consists of three phases and can be quite lengthy depending on the capacity, speed, and how many problems you are having with the drive, so just be patient and let the program do its job. Hopefully, only with this you will have successfully repaired the hard drive and can use it again, although we reiterate our advice that at this point it is better to change the hard drive that cause problems or disappeared with a new one.
Windows 10 brings another more graphical utility to check if a hard drive is not working properly, and we have to say that it is performing surprisingly well. To do this, the hard drive needs to be shown in File Explorer (so if the drive is gone and is only shown in Disk Management, you won’t be able to do that), and you’ll just have to click Right on it and select Properties, then go to the Tools tab and go to Error checking.
Follow the simple wizard that appears (which really doesn’t give you the option of anything other than to continue checking / repairing or canceling, so don’t worry) and the system will check for any errors that may be found. in the unit and repair them automatically. It is possible that again the system will tell you that the disk is in use and it cannot perform error checking, in which case it will offer to reboot the system to do so before the system fails. operation does not load.
If none of that works and the drive still has the same issues, unfortunately you can lose it and the best thing to do is unplug it and plug in a new drive.