As someone who lost a week-long project due to a sudden drive failure, keep those important files backed up in real time. If you’re trying to get the last bit of life out of your drive, make sure you’re saving any open files regularly to an external drive or a cloud-based storage service.

If you can create a full disk image, you likely won’t have to worry about this though. To make it easier to make the transition easier from an old drive to a new one, create a list of everything you need to install along with any product keys. Make a list of all installed software and product keys.The drive may not last long enough to do a full disk image. If your hard drive is already having major issues, start by backing up what’s most important. A few things you should do the moment you realize your hard drive is failing include: Of course, if the results of any of the checks above are less than positive, don’t wait until tomorrow – take action immediately. Choose “Defragment and Optimize Drives” from the results.Open “Search” by pressing on the magnifying mirror icon in the Task Bar and typing “disk defrag.”.You can do this using the defrag tool built into Windows. If you feel like your non-SSD hard drive is slowing down, then you should check to see how fragmented it is. SSDs work a little differently, and while they never need defragmentation (because fragmentation relates to where the data is physically stored on the drive, which isn’t a factor on SSD), they do sometimes need optimizing.

Traditional SATA hard drives may have largely made way for much faster solid-state drives, but they’re still very popular and remain an affordable way to store things like pictures, videos and other non-strenuous file types.

On Dell and HP laptops, you should be able to check hard drive health by going to the BIOS and looking for “Diagnostics.” 2. The BIOS is also a good place to see whether the hard drive you want to check is actually being detected by your PC/motherboard.

Disk checker utility