How to Prepare for Disk Failures

You can take several steps to prepare yourself-and your computers-for troubleshooting disk problems before the problems occur. First, familiarize yourself with recovery and troubleshooting tools. Use of disk redundancy lessens the impact of hardware failures. Backups ensure minimized data loss when failures occur. Protect yourself from malicious attacks by using antivirus software. Finally, perform regular maintenance on your storage devices. You should familiarize yourself with the System Recovery tools and have a Windows DVD available to start the tools if the hard disks are not available.

Run ChkDsk /f /r regularly to fix file system problems that may appear because of faulty hardware, power failures, or software errors. Schedule downtime to reboot the computer and allow Autochk to resolve problems on boot and system volumes. Regularly review the ChkDsk output and the event log to identify problems that ChkDsk cannot fix.

For desktop computers that store critical, constantly updated data, use hardware disk redundancy (also known as RAID) to allow computers to continue to function if a hard disk fails. Keep replacement disks on hand.

At a minimum, back up critical files nightly. Redundancy does not eliminate the need for backups. Even redundant file systems can fail, and disk redundancy cannot protect against files that are corrupted by an application. You must restore corrupted files from an archival backup created before the corruption occurred.

Viruses, spyware, and other types of malware are a significant source of disk and file system problems. Follow these guidelines to avoid infecting computers with viruses:

• Install a virus detection program. Configure the virus detection program to automatically retrieve updated virus signatures.
• Use Windows Update to ensure that operating system files stay up to date.
• Keep applications up to date, especially Web browsers, which malware often abuses to install unwanted software. Windows Update distributes updates for Internet Explorer.
• Never run untrusted scripts or applications.
• Use Windows AppLocker to prevent users from running nonapproved software.

Although fragmentation will not cause a hard disk to fail, it will cause performance problems. To avoid performance problems, schedule the Defrag command-line tool to run regularly during off-peak hours. Store the output of the Defrag tool to a text file and review that text file regularly to ensure that defragmentation is performing as expected. To further minimize problems caused by fragmentation, ensure that all volumes have at least 15 percent free space available.