Fixing Computers

 Some steps to troubleshoot harddrive

1. Physical connectivity - Is the drive receiving power? Is it plugged into the PC by a correctly connected ribbon cable? For IDE drives, are its jumpers set correctly? Or with SCSI drives, are its SCSI termination and ID set correctly?
2. BIOS setup - Does the BIOS see the drive?
3. Viruses - Does the drive contain any boot sector viruses that need to be removed before continuing?
4. Partitioning - Does FDISK find a valid partition on the drive? Is it active?
5. Formatting - Is the drive formatted using a file system that the OS can recognize?
6. Drive errors - Is a physical or logical drive error causing read/write problems on the drive?
7. Operating system - Does your OS have a feature that checks the status of each drive on your system? If so, what is that status?

 To do troubleshooting on the harddisk drive using flowchart, please refer to the chart below. It is a detailed flowchart on IDE drive failure taken from "Computer Repair with Diagnostic Flowcharts".