Ways to Diagnose a Computer Hard Disk Drive. Before doing anything to your drive, read the Warnings section below. Basics Of Hacking And Penetration Testing. Determine if the drive is inaccessible because of a mechanical failure or a software problem. If the drive is making strange rattling or clicking noises, turn off the computer immediately. You can remove the drive by taking the cover off of the side of your computer or the drive bay of your laptop and using a screwdriver to disconnect the drive from its mounting bracket. Disconnect the cables from the back of the drive and store it in a cardboard box or an antistatic bag. You can fix this mechanical problem yourself if you are brave. Otherwise, do a Google search for computer repair or data recovery specialists in your area. This process is expensive, but can be worth it if your files are very important. If the drive seems to be working normally but appears as unformatted in your computers BIOS or Windows, you may be able to fix it yourself. If your computer boots into Windows, the C drive is just fine and will make repairing your secondary drive or partition much easier. If your Windows drive appears as an unformatted drive in your computers BIOS, remove it following the removal instructions in Step 3 and mount it in a working Windows PC. This could be a friends computer or an old 2. XP machine that you have kept after an upgrade. If you need to attach a laptop drive to a desktop machine or vice versa, you may have to purchase an external drive enclosure that converts your drive interface from PATA, SATA, or SCSI to USB or Fire. Wire. You may need to do this anyway, depending on the age of the computer you are using to fix the drive. Older computers may not support drives from newer computers. Check your drives or the computers users manual to be sure. Once you have the problem drive mounted in a computer with a working Windows drive, ensure that you never write data or format the broken drive, as this can cause permanent data loss. If you have only damaged or erased essential operating system files from your Windows drive, the disk can still be read from your repair PC and you can easily recover data from My Documents, etc. Just browse to the files in Windows Explorer and burn them to a DVD or CD for later replacement. Move the drive back to its native computer and reinstall Windows on it. This will reformat the drive and any information still on it will be erased. Once you have a fresh, clean, and fully functional copy of Windows, you can put your files back in their rightful places and get on with the lengthy task of reinstalling all of your programs. If the drive in question is a data drive or a Windows drive that appears as unformatted, you will have to use data recovery software, the best example of which is Test. Disk, a free utility that will analyze your drive and recover your data. Get it at http www. Test. DiskDownload and unzip and run the program.