Posted by Carm on February 08, 19101 at 15:06:48:
In Reply to: Hard Drive Marbles posted by Robert J Hutchinson on October 18, 19100 at 11:55:29:
: I do data recovery and a few of the drives that I get from clients sound as if the read/write head is slaming into the side of the case. Of course, the BIOS does not see it, so I cannot do Data Recovery on it. The next step would probably be a clean room. Does anyone have an idea why the drive is doing this and what a typical fix might be, like replacing the circuit board??
Rob:
HDD are very delicate pcs of hardware. Heads fly above the platter on a cushion of air created by the fast spin of the drive. the HFH/HDT (head flying haight, or head-to-disc tolerance) is microscopic. Heads continually do soft landings everytime you power down your computer. over the life of a PC the heads pick up residue from these soft landings, and depending on a number of variables(temp/hum/handling/static, etc.)these drives can fail. Noises emminating from a drive are a bad sign. a constant sound could mean that a bearing has gone bad(drive can still be accessed) or at worst, the heads have crashed and are grinding themselves onto the platter(drive will be inaccessible. An intermittent sound usually means that a head has come loose and is tumbling around or that the PC/HDD was dropped and one or more of the platters is warpped and everytime the head comes around the high spot in the platter it hits it. Data recovery from these damaged HDD is possible. A reputable Data Recovery Center could access the undamaged platters and recover some of the data. Sometimes even data from good areas of a dammaged platter can be recovered. The cost of recovery is astonomical. When deciding on data recovery, one has to weigh the recovery cost/recreating cost factor.
Good Luck.