One drive that doesn’t do anything at all could have an electrical board failure, a motor seizure, corrupted firmware, or bad heads. They may appear identical from the exterior; they vary greatly in price; and only one of them represents serious trouble.
Most disks labelled as dead are electronically dead but physically good. The data remains on the disk but it cannot be accessed. This is a completely different issue than when data is actually destroyed.
Connect power and listen without touching anything. Total silence, no vibration: usually, it’s the circuit board or its power circuitry. This is the best of all the options listed: The mechanism remains unchanged and your data is safe behind failed electronics. A repeated buzz or click with no spin-up: the motor has tried & failed to move; likely due to a seized bearing or excessive friction (stiction). Spins up and sounds normal but is not detected: firmware issues; user data typically still intact. Spins up and clicks rhythmically: heads. Shut down immediately; this is the worst case scenario.
Most boards will fail from surges, failed parts and age. Fortunately, these are also the easiest to recover from. Since approximately 2005, hard drives have stored an adaptive calibration value specific to each unit in a ROM chip on the main board. If you replace the bad board with another board which doesn’t have this same information stored in its ROM chip, the hard drive may do nothing at all or attempt to run using the incorrect values stored in the new ROM chip.
The first option would be to fix the original circuit board (also referred to as “board level repair”) by either fixing your existing one, or transferring the ROM onto an identical donor board. Either way, this is standard bench work; however, it’s certainly not something that should be attempted at home. And purchasing the exact same drive model off of eBay is a decade old piece of advice.
If you have motors that will not turn or damaged heads it may be necessary to open your hard drive. We replace the bad head(s) with a matched set of heads from a donor unit of the same family and firmware. Typically when a spindle has failed we can take the platter pack out of the damaged unit and put it into another donor unit maintaining the original alignment. In either case, these processes are very accurate but also allow you to make what amounts to only one shot at each process. Therefore, we image the drive as soon as possible after completion of this process so that we do not have to test the drive multiple times.
It is therefore very expensive to keep trying to power up a failing clicking drive because in every attempt, you are causing damaged heads to drag across the surface that holds your valuable data.
The aim of whatever method used will always be the same: simply get the drive readable enough to copy (clone) it and use the clone thereafter. All file system recovery, extraction and verification processes can occur against an image of the original, therefore the original need only remain readable at one point in time.
A single hard drive costs from £300 +VAT once a free 48 hour diagnostic and written quotation have been provided. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. If we needed to open the drive or fit new parts from a donor unit, we require a 50 per cent deposit, with the balance only due when we had successfully recovered your data. Please send the bare drive as opposed to sending the entire computer unit.
Usually, yes. Most “dead” drives are actually just electrically dead but mechanically healthy, and therefore contain the data behind a bad circuit board, making them the best chance at recovering. The serious case is a drive that spins and clicks, which means damaged heads.
No. While this is consistently suggested by many online forums and is damaging (the cold environment causes condensation on the platter of your hard drive once you turn the system back on), we do not recommend attempting to cool a faulty drive. This method may also make the recovery process more difficult for professionals.
Never on a modern drive. Modern hard drive boards include a ROM chip that contains specific calibration information about each hard drive, starting from approximately 2005. Therefore, a replacement board will require that the original ROM be copied onto the new board before installation; otherwise the new board may provide no improvement, or worse, provide incorrect calibration values.
Listen to the drive. A silent drive (with no vibrations) usually means the board: the best-case scenario. Any sort of buzzing, clicking etc. without spinning indicates a problem with the motor. If the drive spins normally, but isn’t detected then it’s firmware. And, spinning with a regular clicking pattern indicates the head(s) are failing. As such, stop using that drive immediately.
Prices start at £300 + VAT for a single drive, and will include a fixed written quote once we’ve completed our complimentary 48 hour diagnostic process. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. However, when a drive needs to be opened or components replaced with those from another drive (a ‘donor’ part), we require a 50% deposit upfront, with the balance due only when we successfully recover your data.