Hard drives fail. It is a fact of life for anyone who uses a computer. If you store irreplaceable information on your hard drive, then a failure can be a catastrophe. But can you recover the family photos, work documents or financial data that you kept meaning to back up, but never did? There might be hope, so don’t give up on that broken hard drive yet.
Just remember one thing — even if your files can be restored, it will take hours of frustrating effort and might cost you quite a bit of money, too. The best way to fix a dead hard drive is to send it in under warranty and replace it with your backup drive that has all your files safely stored on it.
Why hard drives fail
A hard drive is a mechanical device with several moving parts. Magnetic platters store the data itself, while a motorised spindle spins the platters. A read/write arm moves across the platters, retrieving information or putting down new data. The arm is moved by an actuator, and the read/write heads themselves hover an infinitesimal distance above the platters. The distance is so small that a single piece of dust can get in the way.
If any of the hard drive’s mechanical parts fails, the whole drive will fail. The parts operate with incredible precision, so hard drives are rather fragile. Circuit boards, spindle motors, ball bearings — any of these parts are susceptible to failure. The worst type of failure is known as a head crash. In this case, the read/write head drops down directly onto the platter and scrapes away the magnetic material. The data in that case is totally, permanently lost. Data on unaffected parts of the platters may be recoverable, but usually data are spread around the platters, so a head crash is really bad news.
Other mechanical failures can be both a curse and a blessing. It’s a curse because it can be difficult and expensive to get replacement parts and find someone who can make the repair. It’s a blessing because, as long as the platters weren’t damaged, the data are still there. If you can get the drive running again, the data should be accessible.
The failure might be non-mechanical. Your computer uses a special index and file structure to read all the files stored on the disk. If this index becomes corrupted, the computer won’t be able to see or read the data, even though it’s still there. In many cases, this can be repaired with the proper software, although it can be tricky.
There’s one last area where a drive can fail, and it’s particularly insidious because the drive actually didn’t fail at all — the drive’s connection to your computer failed. Hard drives connect to your computer’s motherboard via a variety of interfaces, IDE, PATA and SATA being the most common. If this connection, or the circuit on the motherboard that controls the disk (called the disk controller) has failed, the symptoms can mimic the symptoms of a hard drive failure. Below are simple steps you can follow to recover some of your files:
Download, install disk drill for Windows or Mac OS X
Launch Disk Drill recovery software, select the crashed hard disk and click “Recover” button.
Preview the files you found with Quick or Deep scan. Disk Drill provides you with a complete disk scan report at the end of the recovery operation. The report contains a list of all complete and partial files found.
Click “Recover” button to recover