Anatomy of a Hard Drive

Anatomy of a Hard Drive

Why did my Hard Drive Fail?

Why did my Hard Drive Fail?

A-Z of Data Recovery

A-Z of Data Recovery

Send Us a Drive

Send Us Your Drive

Data Recovery Guides

Data Recovery Guide

Data Recovery Guide Volumn 2

Click..Click...Click - Simple Drive Diagnostics

Seagate Drives

Symptoms

  • Your Seagate disk is making a clicking noise, but only for the first 15-20 seconds after the computer system has been powered up, then the drive appears to power down.
  • Your Seagate disk is making a continual clicking noise.
  • Your Seagate disk is not spinning and is not seen in the BIOS.
  • Your Seagate disk is seen by the BIOS but appears in Windows as being "not formatted" or "inaccessible"

Common Causes of Failure for Seagate Drives

  • Electronic failure of the logic board - very common in their Momentus range of drives.
  • Failure of the drive heads.
  • Head Crash- the drive head gets "stuck" to the drive platter.
  • The drive is ridden with bad sectors.

Maxtor Drives

Symptoms

  • The drive is totally dead. No power seems to enter the drive whatsoever.
  • The drive is seen by the BIOS but is not seen by Windows.
  • The drive is seen by Windows but causes the operating system to freeze, not giving user enough time to view data files or time to extract significant amount of data off the drive.
  • The drive is making a dull knocking or clicking sound.

Common Causes of Failure

  • The drive's voice coil has failed.
  • Failure of the drive heads.
  • The drive has a failing or failed actuator arm.

Samsung Drives

Symptoms

  • Your Samsung Disk is seen in the BIOS but Windows but cannot see any partition.
  • Your Samsung Disk is not spinning and is not seen in the BIOS.
  • Your Samsung Disk is spinning but is seen in the BIOS.
  • Your Samsung Disk is seen in the BIOS, making a loud clicking noise but is not seen by Windows.

Common Causes of Failure

  • Samsung disks are extremely sensitive to static electricity and sudden changes in voltage. (as caused by a power spike)
  • Failure of the drive's logic board.

Lacie, Seagate, Western Digital and Maxtor External Hard Drive

The most common problem we come across with external hard drives is that the user has dropped the device onto a hard surface. This can cause a number of problems such as a head-crash, (especially if the drive was switched on at the time of the fall) or the resulting shock damage can cause the ball-bearings in the spindle motor to displace and fail. Dropping an external hard drive that is switched on, at the time of the fall, can incur serious damage.

USB Flash Drive (San Disk, Transcend, Disgo, Kingston, Verbatim, Generic Brand etc)

USB Flash drives or USB sticks have become an extremely common form of portable data storage. Although, there are no moving parts inside them they are still liable to data loss.

Symptoms
USB stick/ flash drive plugged into Windows-based computer and gives user message "drive not formatted" or simply "not formatted".
USB stick plugged into computer but drive is not recognised at all.
Data has suddenly disappeared from the drive for no apparent reason.

Common Causes of Failure

Physical damage is extremely common in this type of media. The data is stored on a flash memory chip, this chip is then paced on a small circuit board and the board is usually connected to the actual USB connector by very delicate soldering. When this soldered connection breaks, the drive usually becomes invisible to a computer.

The user removes the USB stick from a computer system when the drive is being written to (e.g. during the transfer of data from PC to USB drive) resulting in corruption of the data. (Some USB drive manufacturers use a built-in LED indication light in their drives to warn the user that data transfer is taking place)
Component failure is another reason for failure of USB flash drives. Many users assume they did something wrong to cause the failure of their flash drive when in fact the drive may just have failed because of a poor quality component inside the device.