Troubleshooting Hard Drive

This post aims to tell what is usually “break” in one hard drive and what problems may arise when trying to remove.

A little addition.
Many people talk about myths and legends, how they saved the information of the totally damaged disk, how their plates were landed, and hung outside a special reader, how even after 8 times low level formatting a result of permanence ripping. The truth is that, all attempts to retrieve information based on the use of standard magnetic heads using standard electronics and of course one way or another “revival” of the disk. The actual “recovery” does not mean much opportunity to use the disk as such and retrieving any data from it.

Basic troubleshooting tips and ways to eliminate them.

1. Imprint – the most common cause of failure in modern drives.

The reason for such defects are the most common deterioration of mechanical and / or electronics of the disk, but also in micro-programme errors. Is most often destroy those parts of micro-programme responsible for SMART Following the so-called effect of “instability of record” at work disk begins to generate errors (known as Bad sectors) As a consequence, the disk does not stop its work and continues to work at the time of work passing through such a sector attempts to read / write when returning an error code. Accordingly, the automatic isolation of the poor in particular sectors and SMART make relevant information professional settings. But due to the effect rather than to correct the work of the disk without the user understand the problems of professional information is partially or completely destroyed.

Destruction of official information is usually caused by such effects Unscrew the package with the heads without visible disk of the BIOS, but unscrew the incorrect parameters in the BIOS. Problems of this type are solved in general with the recovery of damaged parts. But unfortunately this is not simple. To solve the problem are much needed. However, the producers themselves do not provide this information. There are companies involved in the study of disks, their micro-programmes and development of software-hardware products in this area.

2. Electronics

Simple solution is just-burnt is replaced by a similar disk of a similar, but:
a. Finding such a part is not always easy, especially when the disc is boring already stopped production of and does not find in stores
b. In discs from the same manufacturer and of the same family happens to electronics are completely incompatible
c. The board of electronics is often part of the disk micro-programme which must coincide with what is written on the tables. Including different adaptive settings.

3. Failure to block the magnetic head or a switch.

Such failure is the most complex. Ie having to open the disk and replace blocks of magnetic heads. In this regard, it is usually a damaged media and over finding a donor may have a rather complex problem. To carry out this operation required a lot of experience and special equipment. Usually malfunction leads to total and irretrievable loss of data.

4. Destroyed file system

Seemingly the most elementary case. Formatting, accidental deletion of a document, folder or partition, virus attacks, soft Bad sectors, etc … On the market there are many products helps address issues of this kind each with its advantages and disadvantages. But experience shows that improper handling, however, also cause partial or total loss of data with the only difference that the media remains usable.

In conclusion I would allow myself to paraphrase a proverb. “Cheap always comes out more expensive.