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Dell Migrate User's Guide

Troubleshooting hard disk failure issues

If a disk failure error message is displayed, your hard drive is experiencing critical errors, and the erase process cannot be completed successfully. It is recommended that you back up all important data, and contact your vendor for possible options to replace the drive as soon as possible.

Data Assistant uses a utility that is called Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) to check the health of the drive.

S.M.A.R.T. is a monitoring tool that is built into most of modern disk drives, such as HDDs, SSDs, eMMC drives, and so on. The primary function of S.M.A.R.T. is to detect and report various indicators of drive reliability with the intent of anticipating imminent hardware failures. By checking the value of parameters, the health status of a drive can be determined.

Data Assistant uses this S.M.A.R.T. information to prompt you when the drive health is likely to cause a failure during erase.

Figure 1. Hard disk failure
Hard disc failure

Since S.M.A.R.T. failures are hardware level issues, there are limited resolution options available:

  • Perform the following steps to check for any errors, and repair the drives present on your system:
    1. Open File Explorer, and on the left pane, click This PC.
    2. Right-click any drive. For example, C:.
    3. Click Tools, and click Check.

    Your system starts checking for any issues with the current drive. It also attempts to repair the issues it finds.

    Figure 2. Error checking
    Error checking
  • Perform the following steps to optimize the drive:
    1. Open File Explorer, and on the left pane, click This PC.
    2. Right-click any drive. For example, C:.
    3. Click Tools, and click Optimize.
    4. Repeat step 3 for all drives.

    Your system should automatically start defragmenting and optimizing the drives. Depending on the type and hardware of your drive and the size of the drive, it can take from a few seconds to a few minutes.

    Figure 3. Optimize and defragment the drives
    Optimize and defragment the drives
    Figure 4. Optimizing drives
    Optimizing drives
If these steps provided do not help, it is recommended that you back up all the important data, and contact your vendor for possible options to replace the drive as soon as possible.

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