Help and Advice – Keyboard Knock Creates Unresponsive Hard Drive
This week we take a look at some of the enquiries that have come into Data Clinic in the past day or so.
Hard drive seems to have malfunctioned after a knock to the key board. There are a few short clicks when the computer is switched on. the screen lights up but is blank unless WiFi is on in which case it says it is trying to repair itself.
The keyboard seems not to be working. There is no visible damage. HP laptop ca. 2010.
In laptop computers the hard drive is often located just underneath the keyboard and a knock to the keyboard, if severe enough, will affect the hard drive too. In your case, with the symptoms you describe, I believe that your hard drive has some sort of mechanical problem. Without seeing it, it’s difficult to be more precise, but a mechanical problem implies that one or more of the moving parts inside the hard drive has become compromised or damaged. Recovery of the data from the hard drive will most probably require cleanroom attention and the swapping out of defective parts with working ones. Hard drives with problems like yours often make a repetitive ticking or scratching noise when powered up. This is a common mechanical problem often known as a head fault – see here from more https://www.dataclinic.co.uk/data-recovery-ticking-hard-disk-head-problem/. It’s difficult recoveries like these that we do everyday at Data Clinic – just call us and we’ll get your hard drive booked in for diagnosis.
Drowned Phone Needs Data Recovery
My phone is not being recognised anymore on my PC/laptop. It has been drowned. Trying to find out if the notes/photos or data from apps can be recovered. Phone responds but will not allow to be unlocked. Could you give me an estimate and rough timescale for data recovery in these circumstances?
We get a lot of phones sent to us that have been dropped into water and there’s some great advice for drying the phone out and trying to rescue the data yourself in one of our pages from February at https://dataclinic.co.uk/phone-dropped-into-water-recovering-deleted-messages/. If you follow our advice on that page you may find that you’re phone starts working again and you can access your data. The advice doesn’t always work though and sometimes it’s necessary to use our phone recovery services. You can get a good overview of what we can do here – https://www.dataclinic.co.uk/data-recovery-from-mobile-devices-phones-tablets-etc/.
Unrecognised WD My Passport
Computer doesn’t recognise WD My Passport (older version). White light at hard drive is flashing when it is connected & “Windows Sound” comes up as usual when you connect an extern device, but hard drive won’t come up under “Computer” and I can’t access my data.
It’s worth pointing out that the “Windows Sound” is confirmation that the computer can ‘see’ the external USB interface, rather that the device itself. It’s important to distinguish between the two: a broken hard drive inside a working USB case may well still trigger the “Windows Sound” when connected to the computer, so this noise should not be taken as confirmation that an external hard drive is working fine. I’d be tempted to suggest your hard drive has developed bad media and is struggling to read the data from parts of the disk surface. This is a common problem that we can recover the data from, call us and we’ll go from there.
Data Clinic Southampton
Did you know Data Clinic now have a branch in Southampton providing phone and hard drive recovery services? Our Southampton web page is here – https://www.dataclinic.co.uk/data-recovery-and-hard-drive-recovery-southampton/.
