Dear Geek,
Sometimes my computer gives me an error message of “disk not found”. What does this mean and how can I stop the message from coming up?
Signed,
Disk Flopped
Dear Flopped,
It’s not uncommon for a hard drive to become damaged after a few years of use. Windows includes an ‘Error Checking’ utility that checks for bad sectors of the hard drive, so it knows to avoid them.
If you want to run the ‘Error Checking’ utility, in Windows 7, click “Start”, select “Computer”, and right-click which hard drive you want to check. Click “Properties”, select “Tools”, and click “Check Now” (under ‘Error Checking’). A pop-up window will come up. Put checkmarks next to “Automatically Fix File System Errors” and “Scan For and Attempt Recovery of Bad Sectors”. Click “Start” and Windows will let you know it can’t check the disk for errors while it’s in use. Select “Schedule Disk Check” to run it the next time the computer reboots. Depending on the size of the hard drive, and how much data is on it, the scan may take some time. When it’s done, it’ll let you know if there were any bad sectors, and if it fixed any errors.
Running the scan in Windows 8 is very similar. Click “Start”, select “Computer”, right-click which hard drive you want to check. Click “Properties”, select “Tools”, click “Check Now”. Windows 8 will run a quick scan, and may tell you it didn’t find any file errors. Then you can choose between “Scan Drive” or “Repair Drive”. Either way, you will have to re-boot your computer if there are errors that cannot be repaired while the drive is in use. When finished, the computer will let you know what it found, and if it had to do any repairs.
If you have a question for our Resident Geek, send it to: geek@tbyd.ca. We’ll translate it from Geek-lish to English, so it actually helps!
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