How To Avoid Making A Bad Situation of Your Hard Disk Even Worse

Dear Friend,

Here, It is my pleasure to call your attention and share with your my humble opinion on hard disk protection.

If you experience a hard drive crash, it doesn’t take much to make a bad situation even worse. In the event of a hard drive crash, in most instances, the data is completely recoverable at first. However, as part of human nature, we often try to avoid the high costs associated with hard drive data recovery in order to find some sort of “quick fix” to a very serious problem. In this report we will go over some of the symptoms of a hard drive crash and the things you can try in the event of a suspected hard drive crash, along with things you should avoid.

What Noise Is The Drive Making?

The first thing to take into account is whether or not the hard drive is making any unusual noises. Often times when there is a problem with the read/write head within the drive or a firmware issue in the logic board a “clicking” sound will be heard. If this is the case, then you should immediately power down the system and refrain from reapplying power.

Never Ever Open Your Hard Drive.

If the data on a hard drive has even the most minimal value to you, then it is imperative that you do not open the drive. Opening a hard drive in air meeting anything less than the standard listed above will mean certain death for your hard drive and any data contained therein.

The Freezer Method

There has been a long running wive's tale about putting your hard drive in the freezer when it crashes in order to revive it just long enough to pull your data off of it. We've run this test for fun on many occasions in different scenarios with junk test drives that we have in our lab. So far we have yet to see this actually produce any positive results. In fact, in one instance we actually began to see the formation of tiny microscopic ice crystals on the platter themselves, which is a definite crash waiting to happen.

In all, If you’ve experienced a hard drive crash, it is imperative that you consider the value of the data, before you consider the money you might save by doing it yourself. Data recovery is a specialty, and it requires a number of specialized tools, skills and software to complete successfully.

So if you encounter with hard disk crash situation and the data on hard disk is crucial for you, the best and wise choice for you is to go to a data recovery company which has professional skill and tool for data recovery. Do not try any unprofessional action.

Donor Matching Parameters for Different Drive Brand

Maxtor Hard Drive:

Maxtor PCBA Change:Model;PCBA number
Maxtor FW Change:Model;Code;The first 3 digits of SN
maxtor Head Change:Model;the 4 letters(X,X,X,X)

Seagate Hard Drive:

Seagate PCBA Change:Model;FW Edition;If the HDD has ROM chipset:Change ROM data
Seagate FW Change:Model;FW Edition;The first 3 digits of SN
Seagate Head Change:Model

WD Hard Drives:

WD PCBA Change:Model;FW edition;the first 3 digits of SN,Motor number
WD FW Change:Silver1:Model,FW Edition;CapacitySilver2/Black1/2:Model,FW Edition;Capacity,Motor Number;
WD Head Change:Model;The first 3 digits of DCM;Motor Number

Hitachi Hard Drive:

HITACHI FW Change:Use Original FW in SA-C to recover FW in SA-A and SA-B
HITACHI PCBA Change:HDD series and the first 2 lines identification label same
HITACHI Head Change:same model

More Infromation, please find in our FAQ system.

Hard Disk Clicking Causes

In Data recovery field, we often meet with problem of hard drive clicking, sometimes described as a repeating tick tick tick type of ticking sound. If you hear this kind of Clicking noise, This means your hard drive suffers from physical damage. If you use a S.M.A.R.T enabled disk, you may see a warning of a imminent disk failure when you power up your computer. you’d better turn off your computer immediately and find some professional persons who can help you. Otherwise, the data in your computer is at the risk of Loss.

The following can be the possible reasons for these clicking noises:

1, Bad sectors

Bad sectors are areas of the hard disk that become unreadable. The clicking sound happens when the head attempts to read from the same area of disk multiple times due to failed attempts. This can also occur when the head is unable to calibrate with the media servo tracks due to the gradual weakening of the magnetic domains on the platter that causes the drive to reset continuously. If the conditions of the disk is not too bad, a standard process is to perform a disk surface scan. This helps to mark all bad sectors and prevent your system from writing new data on the damaged areas of the disk.

2, Head Crash

This is a physical damage of the disk platter when the head of a hard disk scratches the surface of the disk. The grinding sound is therefore observed when this occurs. Firstly, turn off your computer and do not attempt to power it up. Consult a data recovery firm immediately and avoid dismantling the disk to repair the problem yourself. Operating without the correct tools and a clean environment can result in further extensive damage which complicates the recovery process.

3, Mechanical Faults

Sometimes these sounds can be a result of a defective spindle, Read Write head or loose omponents. If you are still able to access data on the disk, you are strongly advised to backup all your data immediately. Your disk is close to demise. If your disk stops spinning after a period of clicking sound, you may wish to send your disk to a reputable data recovery firm to recover your data.

4, Virtual Memory Paging

When your physical memory is full, the drive may perform numerous virtual memory paging at the same time maintaining the system’s operation. This will result in excessive disk activity. To deal with this problem you can increase the physical memory by adding more RAM into your computer or use a secondary hard disk to contain the swap files.

Clicking sound and whirring sound

Whirring sound happens in the hard disk drive when it searches for a file which is heavily fragmented. This is caused by the spinning platters as the read-write heads zoom back and forth to access the sectors where the data is stored. It is important to distinguish the whirling sound from the clicking sound. This whirring sound can be reduced by periodically defragmenting your hard drive. Defragmenting reorganizes the scattered data on the hard drive to make files and programs run faster. It relocates the commonly accessed files to the beginning of the hard disk where data can load at a faster rate.