PC Maintenance, Troubleshooting and Diagnosis Research Paper

PC Maintenance, Troubleshooting and Diagnosis - Research Paper Example Considering this, it seemed to me that one fine morning when my PC crashes and I lose all my data, I would probably also lose my calm and I would be stranded alone in my room and I would do everything possible to have someone fix it as quickly as it can be fixed. This brought to me another argument, 'would I have to hire a professional for every time I lose data or have problems with my computer', which made me take an interest in troubleshooting, maintenance and diagnosis. I wanted to be able to deal with common issues I face with my PC, without having to rely on another person or spending a great deal of my money on the same, since nowadays virtually everything is available on the internet and moreover, it is free for anyone to take and make use of. So I struck me that with proper fishing of data around the net and following instructions correctly, I can pretty much come up with feasible solutions to any problem which might occur with my computer. I began to think of the most commo n and most frustrating issues that I have had with my PC and made a list of it. Going through the list, it became evident that, whatever the problem there is with my PC, I tend to worry most when those problems cause me to lose data, files or folders. I realized that several companies have even gone out of business after having lost vital files and data, which meant that preventing data loss was incontrovertibly an important part of maintenance. I found it ironic that the value of the hardware of my PC was insignificant as compared to the data that my PC contained and intended to learn to deal with it. It occurred to me that in order to be able to overcome data loss, I would first have to understand data loss, to understand why it occurs and learn to troubleshoot and diagnose the problem. I intended to find answers to †¢ What causes data loss? †¢ How I can protect drives and data †¢ How I can recover directory damage, FAT and critical information This study purports t o bring to light feasible and self-evaluable ways to identify, diagnose and make right some of the common and frequently occurring problems. Causes of data loss: Hardware and system failures are the leading cause for data failure, accounting for at least 44% of all data loss. (Bigelow, 2002). Electrical failures and improper shutting down, failures of drive circuitry or disk drive crashes can cause hardware failures, causing previously accessible data to be lost. Often, the drive may not be spinning, and we may hear rattling or scraping noises from the drive while booting. These failures can usually be prevented by humidity and temperature controlled environment, by installing a UPS. Critical data can be saved by using a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) which will mirror the disk drives, enabling us to recreate the lost data. It is important to keep the drive in a clean environment, and in the case of a drive failure, we must not operate the drive as it can exacerbate dat a loss, causing the drive to be corrupted further. Software recovery utilities are a completely bad procedure to resort to in the case of a drive failure as these utilities would run assuming the failed drive to be fully operational. Surprisingly, another important cause of data loss is human