Hard Disk Failure
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What does hard disk failure mean?
Hard drive is a critical component
in your computer that stores all your data. A hard drive crash
means that your hard drive can no longer be read by your
computer system. Typically you will see error message: ‘Insert
system disk’ when booting up computer or a large section of data
on the hard disk can not be read. In this case you may lose all
the data on the hard disk, including documents, files, pictures,
movies or emails.
What cause hard disk failure?
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Firmware Corruption / Damage
to the firmware zone
Hard disk firmware is the
information that is used by the computer that allows it to
correctly interact with the hard disk. If the firmware of a hard
disk becomes corrupted or unreadable the computer is often
unable to correctly interact with the hard disk. Frequently the
data on the disk is fully recoverable once the drive has been
repaired and reprogrammed. This is not common.
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Electronic Failure
Electronic failure usually relates
to problems on the controller board of the actual hard disk. The
computer may suffer a power spike or electrical surge that
knocks out the controller board on the hard disk making it
undetectable to the BIOS. Quite often it's possible to see
visible electrical burn damage around one of the chips on the
controller board. Usually, the data on the hard disk has not
suffered any damage and a 100% data recovery is possible.
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Mechanical Failure
Usually worse than electronic
failure, mechanical failure can quite often (especially if not
acted on early) lead to a partial and sometimes total loss of
data. Mechanical failure comes in a variety of guises such as
read / write head failure and motor problems. One of the most
common mechanical failures is a head crash. Varying in severity,
a head crash occurs when the read-write heads of the hard disk
come into contact, momentarily or continuously, with the
platters of the hard disk.
Head crashes can be caused by a
range of reasons including physical shock, movement of the
computer, static electricity, power surges and mechanical
read-write head failure.
Mechanical failure can usually be
spotted by a regular clicking or crunching noise. It's
not necessarily a head crash, the most important things to do if
you suspect mechanical problems are
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Power down the drive
immediately as further use will make matters worse
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Call us for a diagnosis
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Logical Failure
Often the easiest and the most
difficult problems to deal with, logical errors can range from
simple things such as an invalid entry in a file allocation
table to truly horrific problems such as the corruption and loss
of the file system on a severely fragmented drive.
Logical errors are different to the
electrical and mechanical problems above as there is usually
nothing 'physically' wrong with the disk, just the information
on it.
How much can it cost to recover a
failed hard disk?
Recovering lost data on a hard disk
can be very costly. Most data recovery services charge on the
emergency factor and depending on whether it is physical or
logical failure that the repair bill can be over a thousand
dollas or a few hundred dollars.
How to avoid it?
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Backup
The importance of back-up can not be
emphasized enough. Many businesses after a hard disk failure can
risk being out of operation entirely or for a long period of
time. As a technology service company, we see this almost
everyday.
Talk to our System Consultant about
different backup plans that suit your need.
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Regular Disk Checkup
While this only helps prevent
logical failure, this simple maintenance can be conveniently
automated using Windows automatic maintenance schedule. If you
don’t know how to set it up, please talk to Safemode
technicians.
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