Here are 4 of the most common type of hard drive fault, recently submitted to the Data Clinic data recovery team. It’s important to note that not all hard drive faults are the same and whilst it’s relatively straight forward to recover data from some, others can be very difficult to extract the data from and a small number can prove impossible. In all the four examples below it should be possible for us to rescue the data off of the device.
Question: I have a Seagate Expansion Portable Hard Drive 500 GB. I have it for 5 years so far and yesterday I bought a new USB cable have tried to down some data to my laptop. In the middle of that it has stopped and pulled the cable out. When I try again to put it in it either beeps or it does not recognise the device.
When can I bring the device?
Answer: It seems that your hard drive was accidentally knocked off something like a table whilst it was powered on and connected to your computer. The beeping is not a good sign and usually means that the hard drives platters are now no longer rotating. This can be caused by either (a) Stiction (b) Motor failure (c) A spindle jam. All 3 causes are serious and mean that the hard drive now has a physical fault and requires clean room attention in order to attempt to retrieve your files. We have locations around the UK, including London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, Glasgow and Sheffield – click to see our local data recovery locations near you.
Question: Seagate expansion disk.
Accidently knocked over and now makes whirring noise when plugged in, still sounds like its connected but not showing up on my devices. The drive is showing on my drivers list but not the others.
I have a lot of vital information on the drive.
Answer: Whilst the cause of this fault was almost identical to the one above it seems the type of failure is very different. The absence of a beeping sound is a good sign and rules out any type of motor or spindle failure. There are many other potential problems with the hard drive but without anymore symptoms it’s difficult to diagnose the problem any further without asking you some more questions to home in on the problem.
Question: My wife’s phone will no longer turn on after being dropped in water. She has some photos that she would like retrieved. Can you offer an approximate quote for this please?
Answer: Water damaged phones are one of the most common problems we get asked to recover the data from. Read more about our phone data recovery service.
Question: I have a Western Digital wireless hard drive that I cannot now access either by wireless or USB. I don’t know why it suddenly failed. I was hoping that you could provide me with a quote to recover the data.
Answer: One of the first things you should check is whether it’s the hard drive’s casing that is malfunctioning rather than the hard drive itself. Remove the hard drive from it’s case and hook it up directly to you computer using a USB cable. If everything is working fine then it’s your case and there’s nothing wrong with the hard drive. If the symptoms are no different then it’s time to do some hard drive troubleshooting.