One of the most common symptoms we hear from our customers is that there “hard drive is freezing”. I think it is important to note that this is a very common symptom because of the fact that hard drives are created to essentially stop working whenever there is something mechanically wrong with them. As a result, many people find that they have total computer freezes before any kind of clicking or buzzing sounds begin to emanate from the hard drive. Hard drive freezing can be a warning of future disk issues.

I think one of the things that a lot of people miss when it comes to a scenario where there hard drive freezes is that often this may be your final chance to back up your drive before major physical hard drive failure occurs. In fact, you definitely need to understand that once you have experienced a major hard drive crash symptom, such as a clicking or buzzing, it may already be too late for you to get your data back by conventional means.

If you are going to try to back up your hard drive when you fear it may be failing, it is always best to do this in Safe or DOS mode. These are typically the least disk intensive modes that your Windows computer can run in and as a result may wear down your drive less.