The Most Common External Hard Drive Problems and Solutions

External hard drives may not be used as much as the one on your motherboard, but the problems that you can experience are the same. Although these problems don’t happen as frequently on external drives, you still need to figure out their nature so you can determine the best way to fix them. Without further ado let’s explore the common problems and the available solutions. Even if you are only suspicious of your hard drive having issues, make sure to back up your data. It’s always better to be prepared and store your data externally rather than to try and recover lost files and fix corrupted data. Let’s take a look at the most common hard drive problems and their solutions.

Human Error

This is probably the most common issue and it is often times very hard to repair as the user may not be aware of the damage that they have done. External hard drive repair related to human errors requires professional help in order to recover data or restore the state of the drive. When you are transferring files or deleting some unknown folder or weird file names, you are changing file locations which are important to the behavior of the OS. These file locations are important for the OS to work properly, and the same goes for the system registry which is used to change OS behavior and settings.

File Corruption

This can be caused by many different factors like power surges, improper shutdown and closing programs that are still running either in the background or foreground. This can lead to your OS bugging out, not being able to access files or losing some of them. A simple solution to this would be to run Command Prompt and execute the “chkdsk g:/f” command. This will let you know if any bad sectors are prevalent or if files have been corrupted. Formatting your drive or using a recovery software would be the next step here, but I would advise you to seek professional help instead or if you plan on doing this on your own, do in-depth research about it.

Malware

If you happen to get strange popups in your browser or get a lot of new extensions, then a malware or some other type of virus is definitely present on your PC. If you are experiencing lag or random shutdowns then I would suggest you download antivirus software, but if you have pop-ups even on your desktop then formatting the hard drive is your last resort. There is no external hard drive repair service strictly for this but you can find tutorials on YouTube or more elaborate written guides.

Heat

This is mostly a hardware related problem which points to the only piece of equipment on your PC that is made to keep it in the right working temperature. The fan, as you might have thought, is the only part you will need to check – this may not be a direct problem with the drive but it is definitely one that affects it.