Hard Drive Failure Types and Solution

Hard drive is the most important part of a computer system, which stores all your data, applications and operating system. Because it has moving internal parts, it may fail at any point of time and may result into critical data loss situations. Such situations can be taken care of by deploying Data Recovery procedures.

Hard drives can fail in four different ways:

1 Damage to firmware zone/ firmware corruption

2 Mechanical failure

3 Electrical failure

4 Logical damage

Whether the lost data and information on the drive is retrievable or not depends upon the extent of the damage and exact cause of the data loss situation.

Firmware Corruption

Firmware means software embedded on hardware. It lies in physical hard disk hardware. It is a program which controls the hard drive. When firmware corruption occurs, operating system can not interact with the drive and thus cause data loss. After repairing the firmware, your data can be easily recovered.

Mechanical Failure

Mechanical hard drive failure occurs due to damage to internal hard drive components such as read/write head, actuator arm, spindle motor, disk platters etc. When any internal component goes faulty, data from the hard drive can not be accessed. You can identify it by clicking and scrapping noise of hard drive internals.

Electrical Failure

Electrical failure generally relates to the issue with hard drive circuit board. Your computer system may face power failure that can damage the logic board on the drive making it undetectable in BIOS. When it occurs, the drive may not spin up when it is powered on. So, it cannot get recognized by the operating system.

Logical Damage

Logical damage takes place due to errors with the logical hard drive components. It may range from simple ones like an invalid file allocation table entry to the more complex ones like file system corruption. It is totally different from the above three hard drive failure types. It can be recognized by the inaccessibility of data, invisible hard drive partitions/volumes and error messages while accessing data.

All these data loss problems can be handled easily by using appropriate Hard Drive Recovery solution. In case of firmware corruption, electrical failure and mechanical failure, you are recommended to take service from recovery experts. On the other hand, logical data loss situations can easily be handled on your own using Data Recovery software.