Common hard disk failures
Hard disk drives could fail in any of the following ways :
Electrical Failure
Firmware Failure
Mechanical Failure
Bad Platter Area
Logical Failure
Complex Failure Mode
A 2.5″ hard drive PCB Board
Electrical Failure
The PCB is the “middleman” of sorts, controlling, communicating and coordinating to read and write data between the hard disk and the computer. As such, if the PCB gets damaged due to power surges or power spikes, you lose access to your data. Frequently, the pre-amplifier circuit of read-write head may also be affected.
Symptoms
Drive is powered, but shows no sign of function
Disk knocking as the motor fails to spin
Clicking sound as the heads search or initialize
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Mechanical Failure
Mechanical damage normally arises as a result of impact or wear and tear.
Internal components, like the read-write head and motors, can become faulty without prior warning. The much dreaded head crash could be a by-product of mechanical failure.
Symptoms
Clicking, grinding sounds
Completely quiet due to ” motor freeze”
“music” tone as the disk is powered up
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Logical Failure
Logical failure refers to any other non-physical failure types. It can be the easiest or the most difficult recovery job depending on the circumstances that leads to logical failure.
Some examples include: Accidental deletion, accidental format, file corruption, software bugs, file system corruption, viruses and malware, and many, many more.
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Firmware Failure
Firmware is the software program normally only accessible by the disk manufacturers. It is used to do low level disk testing and functions that are directly responsible for the proper functions and healthy state of hard disk.
Without the firmware code, no communication will be possible between the PC system and the hard disk.
Modern disks normally have their firmware codes located on data platters and also the PCB board. If the firmware area of the platter is corrupted, the drive will appear to have failed even all the electrical and mechanical components are still fully functional.
Symptoms
drive powers up, but is not recognised by the computer
drive powers up, but is recognised wrongly, sometimes with nonsensical characters
drive freezes during booting up
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Bad Platter Area
A hard drive platter
This is commonly coined as “bad sectors” which are seen as inaccessible data blocks or sectors during reading or writing operation. The main cause is due to wear and tear of platter surface, head crash, manufacturing defects and tracking errors.
There are various levels of bad sector severity. Depending on the situation, different techniques will have to used to “maximise” the recovery yield.
Symptoms
Hard disk still accessible but appear to “hang” or “sluggish”
Constant Cyclic Redundancy (CRC) errors
Unable to access folders or files which could be seen
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Complex Failure Model
Most often, hard disk may not fail in just any single mode. The failure could cause by a combination of some or all the failure modes, normally triggering by one to another. For instance, a read write head crash due to mechanical failure could leave to logical file system damage as well as firmware code corruption. Bad sectors development is also a natural by-product under such circumstances.