If your hard drive is clicking or making grinding noises, you are experiencing system blue screens or system freezes, an error message greets you with ‘drive not formatted’ or ‘operating system not found’, or lastly you are in a never ending loop of computer reboots…there is a very good chance one or more of your hard drives have failed. Below are the 7 most common signs you have lost a hard drive.

Clicking Hard Drive
A clicking hard drive can indicate a head crash, corrupt firmware on the drive's ROM chip, an electrical problem like a burned chip, blown heads, a bad pcb controller, overwritten servo's, damage to the hard drive's platters and alignment issues from being dropped, jarred or a power surge.

System Blue Screens
When your system blue screens when you try to boot or during the middle of an operation, it can mean the operating system has been damaged, there may be bad sectors on your hard drive that the system is unable to read, your hard drive could be failing, you might have a virus or trojan, someone may have deleted critical dll's or system files, the partition or file structure may have become corrupted or damaged.

Drive Not Formatted
A drive not formatted error usually indicates the hard drive's partition has been damaged, deleted or corrupted. It can be caused by a virus, a hard re-boot, a power outage or surge, disc partitioning utilities and sometimes updating software, anti-virus programs or simply installing new software can damage a partition.

Computer Keeps Re-Booting
The most common reason a computer keeps re-booting over and over is because the boot sector has been hijacked by a virus that creates a continuous loop. It keeps telling the system to go back to the boot sector and re-boot.

System Freezes or Hangs
When your system freezes or hangs while trying to boot or while accessing a file or program it usually indicates that there are bad sectors on the hard drive and the system is unable to access the information it needs to open the file or load the program. It can be caused by a corrupt file or shared program files that have conflicting call procedures or too many system resources are being used (the system memory gets full or overloaded).

Drive or Device Not Found
When you get a message telling you the drive is not ready, hard drive or device not found it could mean the hard drive is bad, the boot priority in bios has been changed, the partition structure is damaged, or a virus has infected your system.

Operating System Not Found
An operating system not found message typically means that the operating system files are damaged, the boot device priority has been changed, the partition table is damaged or the hard drive has been formatted.

If your hard drive is experiencing any of the above, your safest option is to turn the computer off. Continued use may damage the platters (data storage area) and make your data unrecoverable. You should then make a note of what happened and consider contacting a company that specializes in data recovery.

ADR Data Recovery is available to evaluate the damage and potentially recover your lost data. For more information on ADR Data Recovery's service, visit http://www.adrdatarecovery.com.

Jason Perry, ADR Data Recovery http://www.adrdatarecovery.com