Permanent storage devices include Zip disks, Jazz disks, Hard Drives, CD’s, DVD’s, Mini DVD’s, Mini CD’s, and so on. The one that is used most often, though, is the Hard Drive. It is the piece of hardware that contains your Operating System and all the files that your computer needs to operate properly. But just like anything man-made, Hard Drives do have a life span. Eventually, they will start giving trouble and then one day it go kaput on you. Sometimes there may be no obvious warning that it is ready to crash. There are however some that you can look out for and make sure that you pay attention to.

Here are a few that are common (even I have have experienced a few of them before my disk crashed some time ago):

- The Hard Drive starts starts making very loud noises, most times like pieces of metal rubbing together or the Hard Drive’s RPM becomes erratic
- Booting the computer from the Hard Drive becomes increasingly difficult
- When you turn the computer on, the BIOS settings do not show your hard drive even though it was there the last time you used the machine
- While booting up, you get an error that says “Invalid Disk. Press any key to boot from another device”, or something like that
- “Invalid System Disk” error when attempting to boot from the Hard Drive
- Operating System tends to hang up frequently and some times eventually freezes for periods of up to an hour or more (Note that this same symptom can be present if there is also a virus problem on your computer or if your Hard Drive needs to be defragmented)
- There are times when Windows gives you the ‘blue screen of death’ stating that a critical OS file has been corrupted and so Windows cannot continue loading or operating
- The computer tells you right out that your Hard Drive is about to fail

There are many other symptoms that are associated with an inevitable failure of a Hard Drive. You can do further searches on the causes of Hard Disk failure by using Google Search. I hope this article has nonetheless helped you to see some of the possible signs to look out for if your Hard Drive is on the verge of crashing.