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Question of the Day: Did you buy your last car with cash or on a finance plan?
FAULTY HARD DRIVES.
- Thread starter C>P>U
- Start date
Hard drive problems fall into 3 main categories; electrical, mechanical and logical.
Logical problems are usually fairly easy and are usually due to some corrupted data; partition tables or otherwise. If you're lucky, you can repair these issues without data loss.
Electrical problems usually mean that some circuitry in the hard drive has gone bad. You can often replace these parts with parts from another identical hard drive. Sometimes these parts are too difficult to replace safely, though. And depending on how, where and when the problem occurred, data may have been corrupted.
Mechanical problems are, to me, the worst. It usually means that the platter motor, head motor, platters, etc, have failed. These are almost impossible to replace yourself. If you were superman, and could replace the platters successfully (remember, even 1 speck of dust on these might render them unusable. And they need to be perfectly aligned, etc, etc, etc. The point is that if you're asking this question, you probably don't have the skill to fix a mechanical problem. But all is not lost. You may be able to recover your data (at great cost) by paying a visit to a data recovery specialist.
Logical problems are usually fairly easy and are usually due to some corrupted data; partition tables or otherwise. If you're lucky, you can repair these issues without data loss.
Electrical problems usually mean that some circuitry in the hard drive has gone bad. You can often replace these parts with parts from another identical hard drive. Sometimes these parts are too difficult to replace safely, though. And depending on how, where and when the problem occurred, data may have been corrupted.
Mechanical problems are, to me, the worst. It usually means that the platter motor, head motor, platters, etc, have failed. These are almost impossible to replace yourself. If you were superman, and could replace the platters successfully (remember, even 1 speck of dust on these might render them unusable. And they need to be perfectly aligned, etc, etc, etc. The point is that if you're asking this question, you probably don't have the skill to fix a mechanical problem. But all is not lost. You may be able to recover your data (at great cost) by paying a visit to a data recovery specialist.