We’ve been seeing an increase in hard drive failures lately, and many are because of the storms that we’ve been having lately.  Power surges and brown-outs are hard on hard drives.

How do you know if your hard drive is failing?  Go to Start, Control Panel (or Settings -> Control Panel), Administrator Tools, Event Event Viewer.  Look under System for events such as “bad block” or read/write failures.  These are indications that your hard drive is failing, and you should waste no time in 1) backing up your data; and 2) replacing the hard drive.