Electronic Failures and Faults on Hard Disk Drives and Data Recovery

Electronic faults on hard disk drives can be caused by a number of problems requiring Data Recovery Services, some of the more common faults and causes can be found below:

Supplying the drive with an incorrect Voltage

This fault is common with external hard disk drives and normally comes about when a similar looking power supply (often a laptop power supply) is plugged into the drive by mistake.  It can also occur when there is a fault with the Power Supply Unit or PSU.  Whatever the underlying cause, the affect that is observed with the drive is normally a total failure, the drive will:

• Fail to power up and will be unable to spin
• Inaccessibility of your data
• The hard Drive will not be recognised by the BIOS and will no show up at POST
• There can be noticeable scorching to the PCB or one of the components contained therein
• These symptoms are normally followed by a burning smell.

Component failure

With this type of electronic failure the drive does not need to experience irregularity in the electricity supply, often the problem that leads to this nature of failure lies within the circuit board or component itself and no external influence is required.   There are many issues that can lead to a blown component, too many to go into here, however, some of the symptoms that you may notice are as follows:

• Your computer may not behave as expected, it may refuse to power on
• Your hard drive will not normally be recognised in the computer BIOS or at POST
• Again a burning smell may be noticed and physical damage may be observed to a chip, or chips on the PCB.

Certain components are more susceptible to failure or burning out, motor controller chips, particularly those manufactured by SMOOTH are prone to failing in this manner, when they do the problem is normally very easy to identify and commonly affects Seagate, Western Digital and Maxtor hard disks.

Motor Bearing Faults including Seizure

Whilst not strictly an electronic fault, motor bearing seizure is a common fault affecting modern hard disks that can lead to problems with the electronics.  More often than not, no damage is caused to the electronics, however, the behviour exhibited can be very similar:

• The drive will not appear to spin up
• A quiet whining or whirring noise is often heard under close inspection
• There may be an almost musical noise coming from the drive or enclosure

In such cases it is critical for the integrity of your hard disk, and for the safety of your valuable data that attempts to power the drive cease immediately.

So what do I do if my hard drive fails in this way!?

The instant reaction of someone who has experienced an electronic failure on a hard disk drive is normally one of shock, this can lead to some very bad decisions being made.

One of the more common ideas is that changing the drive's circuit board is the solution - However - on modern drives this is a very bad idea, it can invalidate your warranty and prevent successful recovery of your data, even by the experts.

This is because modern hard disk drives are precise instruments, the HDA or Head Disk Assembly, the area that reads, writes and stores your data, is an imperfect assembly.  When manufactured no two hard disk drives leave the assembly line with identical platter media or read/write head alignment, in fact, as far as hard disk drives tolerances go, the difference can be immense.  Following production, the drive's PCB is used as a map to any imperfections and mis-alignments - these are all recorded and the drive is tuned using this data.  This is then stored on the PCB so that the drive electronics can start up device correctly.

Swapping a failed PCB can permanently damage this information, recovery from this scenario then becomes a long, complex, and very expensive affair.

The best course of action is to contact abc Data Recovery on 0845 2002 845 for a free quote, electronics faults rarely exceed £200 + vat for recovery - and remember - you only pay if we recover your data, thanks to our no recovery-no fee service.