hard drive Archives - Rick's Daily Tips

Q&A: Will a computer tech be able to see my personal photos?

Posted on September 16, 2022

Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.

Question from Kristen: The hard drive in my laptop has stopped working and I need to take it somewhere to have it fixed.

I’ve been taking your advice about creating regular System Image backups and I have a fairly recent backup they can use to restore everything once the bad hard drive is replaced.

What worries me is I have a lot of really personal photos that were backed up along with everything else. Will a tech be able to see them? [Read more…]

Q&A: How is my PC booting from an empty hard drive?

Posted on August 23, 2022

Question from Marvin: I read your article about upgrading a computer by adding an SSD to make it run faster.

The following weekend I went to Best Buy and bought a 1TB SSD and cloned the contents of the existing 500GB hard disk onto it.

I then wiped the hard drive and installed the SSD in the computer, leaving the now-blank hard drive in place to store my data files on.

Everything works perfectly but something has me baffled. When I look in the BIOS it says the hard drive is set as the boot drive.

How is this machine booting into Windows when the boot drive is blank?

[Read more…]

Beware of strange noises coming from your computer’s hard drive

Posted on April 5, 2022

If the hard drive in your computer is typical, it makes a distinctive sound that you probably learned to recognize once you had used your computer for a day or two.

The sound coming from your hard drive might be a quiet, smooth hum that you can barely hear (if you can hear it at all) or a slightly louder sound, but whatever sound it makes it should make consistently with very little deviation. [Read more…]

4 ways to recover the files from a non-working PC’s hard drive

Posted on December 27, 2021

I receive hundreds of tech questions every week, and the one I seem to get asked most often is how to retrieve the files from the hard drive after a PC goes belly-up.

My answer always depends on which part of the computer has failed.

If the hard drive itself is the component that died, you’ll have to either send the drive off to a data recovery service or purchase a data recovery software utility and attempt to recover the files yourself. [Read more…]

Q&A: How do I decide which programs to install on a small SSD?

Posted on December 25, 2021

Question from Larry: I read your post explaining the advantages of installing an SSD a while back and I’ve wanted one ever since to go in my HP desktop PC.

I ended up buying a 120GB SSD (I got it for $20!) and installed it as the boot drive in my HP desktop computer. I left the 750GB hard drive in there for extra storage.

I installed Windows 10 from scratch on the SSD and now I’m ready to install my programs. The thing is with only 120GB of space on the SSD it won’t hold anywhere near all of my programs.

I have a couple of questions for you:

1 – Which programs should I install on the SSD and which ones should I leave on the hard drive?

2 – Should I leave the original Windows 10 files on the hard drive or is it safe to delete them to free up that space?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]