Home > Hard Disk Failure

Broadly speaking a hard disk can fail in four ways. That is Damage to the firmware zone, Electronic Failure, Mechanical Failure, Logical Failure. Combinations of all four types of failure are also possible. Hard disks also develop bad sectors which can lead to data loss and drive inaccessibility. Hard disk firmware is the information that is used by the computer that allows it to correctly interact with the hard disk.

If the firmware of a hard disk becomes corrupted or unreadable the computer is often unable to correctly interact with the hard disk. Frequently the data on the disk is fully recoverable once the drive has been repaired and reprogrammed. Electronic Failure usually relates to problems on the controller board of the actual hard disk. The computer may suffer a power spike or electrical surge that knocks out the controller board on the hard disk making it undetectable to the BIOS.

Usually, the data on the hard disk has not suffered any damage and a 100% data recovery is possible. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. If you suspect a drive has a controller board fault why not just swap the controller board with that of a fully functioning drive. This practice is not recommended as the information on a controller board is often unique to the disk it is fitted to. Substituting a controller board can often make recoverable data unrecoverable.

Popular drives that seem to develop controller board problems: Quantum Fireball series, Western Digital drives, Maxtor drives, Fujitsu MPG and MPF series. If you have a laptop hard disk - please also refer to our laptop hard disks problems page. Usually Mechanical Failure can often lead to a partial and sometimes total loss of data. Mechanical failures come in a variety of guises such as read / write head failure and motor problems. One of the most common mechanical failures is a head crash. Varying in severity, a head crash occurs when the read-write heads of the hard disk come into contact, momentarily or continuously, with the platters of the hard disk.

Head crashes can be caused by a range of reasons including physical shock, movement of the computer, static electricity, power surges and mechanical read-write head failure. Mechanical failure can usually be spotted by a regular clicking or crunching noise. It's not necessarily a head crash, the most important things to do if you suspect mechanical problems are. Power down the drive immediately as further use will make matters worse.

Often the easiest and the most difficult problems to deal with, Logical Errors can be simple such as an invalid entry in a file allocation table to truly horrific problems such as the corruption and loss of the file system on a severely fragmented drive. Logical errors are different to the electrical and mechanical problems they are usually physically wrong with the disk.

Related Information:

Find software and applications helpful in data recovery for unbootable hard drive

Looking for WordPerfect file recovery software, click here

Freeware tools for outlook express to recover deleted emails

Freeware utility used in data recovery from hard drive to undelete lost or missing files

Lab locations of hard disk data recovery specialists, click here to locate labs

Data Recovery Software - RAID Recovery

More Information
Cause for Data Loss
Disaster Planning
Disaster Level
Business Continuity Planning
Surveying a hard disk?
Network Security Policies
Security Audit
Computer Security Policies
e-Security Toolkit
Plan Assurance
Business Impact Analysis
Disaster Recovery Plan
Disaster Recovery Toolkit
Disaster Recovery Policies
Business Continuity Plan
Risk Analysis
Disaster Assistance
Disaster Recovery Training
Novell Data Recovery
Macintosh Data Recovery
Linux Data Recovery
RAID Recovery
E-mail Recovery
Logical Data Error Recovery
Corruption Recovery Tools

Related Information
File Recovery
Data Recovery USA
DLT Tape Drive
Hard Disk Recovery
RAID Controller