Hard Drive Problems

• Overheating.
• Strange noises.
• Blue Screen of Death errors.
• Stuck spindle motor.
• Inability for the device to boot.
• Bad sectors prevent data access.

Drive not recognised and appears dead

When it comes to data recovery one of the most common problems hard drives experience is burnt cuircuit boards (PCB). Hard drives are very vulnerable to overheating, power surges and streaks. Quite often a bad power supply unit combined with power streak is enough to fry the spindle driver chip on the electronics and make the data inaccessible.

Swapping the PCB from another hard drive of the same model can occasionally work on older models. The problem is that logic board on a modern hard drive is adapted to the head disk assembly it was manufactured with. In our lab we use specialized software and hardware to rebuild these parameters or transfer them from fried board to make donor PCB fully compatible with damaged drive.

Hard drive making clicking or ticking noises

If you hear strange sounds emanating from your computer, hard drive failure is imminent. Clicking or grinding noises coming from the drive are signals that the read/write head or other mechanical component is on its last legs. Your data may be accessible, for now. It is highly recommended to take immediate action to either backup the data or recover the data to another hard drive.

You may not think this is a problem since you can see your files in your file viewer and may even be able to open them without a problem. But that won’t be the case for long. Should your drives read/write heads fail, they could drop down onto the platter surface and scratch or gouge the delicate surfaces, causing data loss.

If you hear these sounds, immediately shut down the computer. The sooner you shut it down, the better. You will need to transfer all of your files to another hard drive or alternate media. However, trying to do this with recovery software or by dragging them to a new location will cause further damage.

ACS data recovery lab has the means to transfer all of your data safely and securely, preventing any further data loss. We stay up to date with the latest and most advanced technology to recover the data from standard rotational drives, SSD drives, and RAID systems.

Hard drive recognised by BIOS, but cannot be accessed

In most cases, logical failure is when the computer’s BIOS can see your hard drive, but for some reason can not access the data on it. It may not be able to mount the partition or may simply report that no drive is present at all. In the most extreme cases logical failure can include a hard drive that spins up fine, but is not even recognized by the computer’s BIOS as being present.

In a logical failure the hard drives electronic components and mechanical components are all working properly. Logical failures occur as a result of defective media (platter degradation) or data corruption from another source (destroyed file table, etc…)

Almost all logical failures can be recovered without the need to open the hard drive. While there are a number of logical data recover software programs on the market, its important to know why your drive has experienced a logical failure before you attempt to recover your data. If you misdiagnose a logical failure, you can cause irreparable damage to the drive in your recovery attempt.