Determine The Failure Type Of Hard Disk And Recovery

As the hard disk is just the de facto storage device in home computers, it is best if the user knows more about the hard disk.

What is more important though, is to know when your disk fails. Since it stores just about all your data, an irreversible failure means that your data goes down along with it.

This is especially true when you suffer hard disk crash. Thus here I have written a guide that is a good guideline to determining the kind of failure that you are suffering from and what measures to take to minimize the damage done.

Sounds

Sounds are a good indicator of a head crash. If you hear any clicking, grinding, scraping, these are indications that your hard disk is suffering/has suffered head crash. Otherwise, the failure is logical in nature.

In fact, it is the most obvious sign of a head crash that any data company worth their salt will immediately diagnose it as such and give you advice to take measures to prevent further damage to your hard disk.

However, if you hear whirring sounds but your computer fails to boot up, it is another kind of hardware failure. The controller chip on the PCB containing the firmware could have suffered damage, usually a result of power surge. This results in the read-write head being unable to properly track the sectors on the platter, and it keeps retrying again and again to read. Or it could even affect the way the different components of the hard disk interact.

The whirring sound is made when the platters spin and stop as the read write head attempts to read information off it.

BIOS

If your hard disk can be detected in BIOS, the most likely cause of failure is logical in nature.

On the other hand if BIOS does not detect the disk, check the internal power connector and connector ribbon is properly attached. There is a possibility that the connection from the motherboard to the disk is not proper. Detach and attach both connectors to see if this problem is clears up.

Once you have done that check, and it still can't be detected by BIOS, then possibly you have encountered hardware failure. This failure can range from electrical to mechanical faults.

System and hardware check

If your hard disk is detected by bios, but your computer shuts down randomly, there are 2 main possible causes; system overheat or faulty hardware.

Check the ventilation holes of your computer, to see if they are choked with dust and other impurities. These holes facilitate ventilation, and keep your system temperature down. Remember to clean the internal fans also, which include the processor fans, the PSU fans and so on.

A hot internal system can cause the various computer components to overheat function improperly. When these components overheat, performance is affected. Your system will sometimes randomly restart itself, or even shut down. The hard disk, for example, is more susceptible to crashes in this situation.

If your ventilation is cleaned but the system still shuts down once in a while, you may have faulty hardware. In most cases, it is the RAM, so you can try swapping it out and see if the problem persists.

Operating System

The system files of your operating system could be corrupted, if your computer can still boot up your operating system (like Windows), but it intermittently hangs, fails to boot up or just simply freeze.

If your operating system doesn't load up at all, and you get error messages such as "invalid partition", "Missing Operating System" or "Error Loading Operating System", there is almost certain that your partitions are causing problems.

Bad Sectors check

If none of the above checks yield any results, the underlying problem could be much worse.

If you can boot up you can load Windows YET the computer crashes occasionally even after you have checked for any system heating problems and other hardware problems, bad sectors might be the problem you are looking at.

OR

If you cannot even startup you computer, there is still that possibility that bad sectors is current suffering.

To check for bad sectors, you can either use Windows chkdsk/scandsk. However, might I recommend ADRC's hard disk checker, which is free too.

Download ADRC's hard disk checker here.

Download and unzip. Run the application (no installations needed), and simply select the disk you are having problems with and click check.

If you cannot startup your computer, detach your hard disk and install it into another computer with a working Windows system and scan from there.

Partitions check

You can use fdisk from Windows 98 bootdisk to see if you can view partitions.

To create Windows boot disk, you can go to our "creating boot disk" guide.

Restart your computer, and boot with your newly created boot disk instead of your hard disk. If Fdisk can see any partitions, most likely your hard disk failure is logical of nature.

If you can see any partitions, you can check the boot sector with our ADRC data recovery tools, and see if the boot sector has any errors. Detach your hard disk from your current system and install it into another working system as a secondary disk.

Download ADRC data recovery tools.

Once you have downloaded and unzipped the file, run the application. Under the tools tab, select the "Boot Builder" command. Then, select the disk letter. After which, select the file system (NTFS for Windows XP users) and the click the "Read Boot Sector" command.

Even if Fdsk cannot detect any partitions, so long as there is no "No Fix Disk" error, the failure is still logical in nature. If however if you see the "No fix disk" error, the failure is hardware based, and if you decide to go for recovery, the costs will be high.

Hopefully, this guide will be useful to you in assessing the nature of your hard disk failure. This is crucial, especially if you decide to go for a professional data recovery service so that you don't be blindsided by not knowing the difference between a hardware failure, hard disk failure, crash, or a logical failure.s