This article helps you to find out what the problem your hard drive is encountering. Please be aware that it won't allow you to identify problems with 100% certainty, but it will help you understand the most common cases. For your data safety, you are suggested to talk to data recovery experts at Data Recovery China.


Check on the symptoms your drive is experiencing, see what problems usually cause these symptoms.

Symptom: Drive won't spin up.
Causes:
Failed PCBA board - [cost: $150]
Corrupted firmware in ROM - [cost:$150]
Failed heads assembly - [cost:$250-$600]
Heads stuck to the disk platters - [cost:$250-$600]
Spindle motor seizure - [cost:$250-$600]
Failed motor - [cost:$250-$600]

Symptom: Drive clicks when powered on.
Causes:
Bad or degraded heads - [cost:$250-$600]
Failed PCB board - [cost:$150]
Corrupted System Area (firmware) - [cost:$150]
Damaged disk platters - [NOT recoverable]

Symptom: Drive is not recognized by the PC, but it spins up and sounds fine.
Causes:
Corrupted System Area (firmware) - [cost: $150]
Read instability issues - [cost:$150]
Failure of one of the read-write heads - [cost:$250-$600]

Symptom: Drive is recognized by the PC, but the data cannot be accessed – for example, PC/OS freezes or gives a data access error while accessing the data.
Causes:
Bad sectors - [cost: $150]
Read instability issues - [cost:$150]
Bad or degraded heads - [cost:$250-$600]

Symptom: Drive looks fully operational, but some partitions, folders, or files are missing.
Causes:
Bad sectors - [cost: $150]
Read instability issues - [cost:$150]
Corruption of the file system - [cost:$150]