Question: Hi.
Just recently my hard drive has died. It’s an HDD i use for my steam games. I noticed Steam wasn’t responding and I tried to exit by right clicking on the icon and clicking ‘Exit Steam’.
As that didn’t work I went to task manager and ended the processes.
Trying to boot up Steam I got:
“The drive or network connection that the shortcut ‘Steam Client Bootstrapper’ refers to is unavailable. Make sure that the disk is properly inserted or the network resource is available, and then try again.”
Turned off PC and checked hard drive plugs and sockets, all are in and where they should be.
I looked in Disk Management and the drive is not missing. I believe it’s dead.
Are there any other ways I could go about testing to see if it’s really dead or just really good at hiding…
Thank you!
Answer:
I’m sure this is a bigger reply than expected. Additional help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
I always operate on the premise that any individual drive may physically die in the next 0.25 sec.
Because I’ve had it happen.
Software reporting 99% health left, or 2% left…that may an indicator, nothing more. Don’t take that report as gospel.
I’ve had seemingly perfect drives die completely, go from perfect to dead in 36 hours, 3TB WD Green HDD, 5 weeks off the store shelf.
Or an SSD (SanDisk UltraII) die somewhere in between turning the system off and 5 minutes later turning it back on.
Why did they die? Dunno, and mostly don’t care.
The WD was obviously still under warranty, free replacement.
The Sandisk SSD was 33 days past the 3 year warranty, but Sandisk gave me a new one anyway. I knew it, they knew it, they did me a solid.
In both cases, 0% data was lost, due to proactive backups.
The drives are physical and electronic devices. Sometimes they fail.
“Fixing” or discovering why would simply be an interest investigation.
At no point should your data be at risk simply because it lives on a single storage device. No matter what type or how old.