How do you know you actually have suffered hard disk crash? What if you were only from suffering from simple logical failures, something that you can fix yourself simply, but were recommended to send it in for an expensive recovery procedure?
And many times, these physical recovery procedures are costly, with starting prices of 1k upwards.
In fact, many situations where data loss has occurred are actually logical in nature, and do not require professional data recovery services. In these situations, you need just one or two extra drives, and data recovery software.
This guide will give you a rough idea on how to diagnose a hard disk related failure and data loss, and if it is logical or physical in origin, or even if were a hard disk related incident!
Sounds
Sounds are a good indicator of a hard disk crash. In fact, it is the most obvious sign of hard disk crash that any data company worth their salt will immediately diagnose it as such and give you advice to take measures to prevent further damage to your hard disk.
Thus, if you hear any clicking, grinding, scraping, these are an indicator that your hard disk is suffering/has suffered hard disk crash.
Otherwise, the failure is logical in nature.
However, if you hear whirring sounds but your computer fails to boot up, it is another kind of hardware failure.
The controller chip on the PCB containing the firmware could have suffered damage, usually a result of power surge. This results in the read-write head being unable to properly track the sectors on the platter, and it keeps retrying again and again to read. Or it could even affect the way the different components of the hard disk interact.
The whirring sound is made when the platters spin and stop as the read write head attempts to read information off it.
BIOS
If your hard disk can be detected, most likely the failure is logical.
If BIOS does not detect the hard disk, check the internal power connector and connector ribbon is properly attached. Possibly, the connection from the motherboard to the hard disk is not properly done. Detach and attach both connectors to see if this problem is clears up.
Once you have done that check, and BIOS still can’t detect you hard disk, then possibly, you have encountered hard disk failure. The failure can range from electrical to mechanical failures.
System and hardware check
If your hard disk is detected by bios, but your computer shuts down randomly, check for system overheat or faulty hardware.
Check the ventilation holes of your computer, to see if they are chocked with dust and other impurities. These holes facilitate ventilation, and keep your system temperature down. Remember to clean the internal fans also, which include the processor fans, the PSU fans and so on.
A hot internal system can cause the various computer components to overheat. When these components overheat, performance is affected. Your system will sometimes randomly restart itself, or even shut down.
The hard disk is also more prone to crashes in this situation. If your ventilation is cleaned but the system still shuts down once in a while, you may have faulty hardware. In most cases, it is the RAM, so you can try swapping it out and see if the problem persists.
Operating System
If you can load up your operating system, there is a possibility failure is intermittent. You should backup all your data immediately.
If your operating system doesn’t load up, and you get error messages such as "invalid partition", "Missing Operating System" or "Error Loading Operating System", there is a possibility that your partitions are causing problems.
Bad Sectors check
If none of the above checks yield any results, the underlying problem could be much worse.
If you can boot up your hard disk, load Windows YET the computer crashes occasionally even after you have checked for any system heating problems and other hardware problems, bad sectors might be the problem you are looking at.
OR
If you cannot even startup you computer, there is still that possibility that bad sectors is your problem.
To check for bad sectors, you can either use Windows chkdsk/scandsk. However, might I recommend ADRC’s hard disk checker, which is free too. (No smart remarks about having paying internet bills. You’re reading this article online aren’t you?)
Download and unzip. Run the application (no installations needed), and simply select the disk you are having problems with and click check.
If you cannot startup your computer, detach your hard disk and install it into another computer with a working Windows system and scan from there.
Partitions check
You can use fdisk from Windows 98 bootdisk to see if you can view partitions.
To create Windows boot disk, you can go to our "creating boot disk" guide here.
Restart your computer, and boot with your newly created boot disk instead of your hard disk. If Fdisk can see any partitions, most likely your hard disk failure is logical of nature.
Also, if you can see any partitions, you can check the boot sector with our ADRC data recovery tools, and see if the boot sector has any errors. Detach your hard disk from your current system and install it into another working system as a secondary disk.
Once you have downloaded and unzipped the file, run the application. Under the tools tab, select the "Boot Builder" command.
Then, select the disk letter. After which, select the file system (NTFS for Windows XP users) and the click the "Read Boot Sector" command.
Even if Fdsk cannot detect any partitions, so long as there is no "No Fix Disk" error, the failure is still logical in nature. If however if you see the "No fix disk" error, the failure is hardware based, and if you decide to go for recovery, the costs will be high.
Hopefully, this guide will be useful to you in assessing the nature of your hard disk failure. This is crucial, especially if you decide to go for a professional data recovery service so that you don’t be blindsided by not knowing the difference between a hardware failure, hard disk failure, crash, or a logical failure.
Determining Hard Disk Failure
