Hard Drive Failures and Data Recovery

A good deal of truth lies in the fact that hard drives fail almost intermittently. Besides pondering over the cause and the elements that lead to the disaster, one should formulate a plan to action to work around the problem quickly. Hard drive failures are classified into two broad categories: logical failures and physical failures. Logical failures are an outcome of human errors or malware attack. Such type failures are an easy bet for anyone having a do-it-yourself recovery tool on hand. On the contrary, physical failures require significant amount of effort, time, and investment.

Physical Failures and Their Types 

Physical failures eventuate when some mechanism inside of the hard drive fails. Given the number of rotations per minute the platter of the drive has to undergo, there is a fair chance that something may go awry leading to failure. Some primary types of physical failures encountered with hard drives are listed below:

Logical Board Failures 

These failures include broken power or data connectors, spindle driver chip failure, and head block pre-amplification failure. A majority of these failures require the logic board to be replaced.

Mechanical Failures 

This correlates with the failure of moving parts inside of your drive. Some typical mechanical failures include head crashes and spindle motor failure.

Firmware Corruption 

This happens when the firmware built into your hard drive has become outdated. You need to update this firmware to resolve the issue.

Most of the time, physical failures are easily visible and they can be sensed observing various symptoms. A physically damaged drive is not recognized by Windows Disk Management, Device Manager, or system BIOS. You may occasionally notice a clicking sound emitted by the drive when accessed. In other cases, your hard drive may tend to lock up quite frequently after specific intervals of time. This most likely happens when you are anticipating a failure in near future.

Overcoming Data Loss in Event of Physical Failures 

When a physical failure occurs, you need to follow preventive measures to make sure your data is still safe on the affected media. The success of any sort of recovery attempt rests on the initial course of action you take after facing the disaster. You need to ensure that the damaged drive is no more used for reading, writing, or copying data. This keeps you from overwriting your original files placed on the hard drive.