Many of our customers ask if the disc can be repaired. We are somewhat conservative about this. Sometimes it is even possible to repair a hard drive, but we don’t do this work and we don’t recommend repairing hard drives that have broken down. Even manufacturers don’t usually repair hard drives. When a disc is damaged and sent to the manufacturer’s warranty, it is discarded and a new disc is sent to the customer. In other words, not even manufacturers repair hard drives. If it’s no longer completely safe to entrust data to a new hard drive, it’s much less safe to entrust data to a repaired hard drive. In these cases, it can be much cheaper to buy a new hard drive than to lose the information and eventually have to hire a service that specialises in recovering data again.
Although there are brands of hard drive that give fewer problems than others, bear in mind that in a time of data loss, the best hard drive will always be the one that is working and has your backups recorded on it. We don’t repair hard drives! They are subjected to a process of disc and read head manipulation for the sole purpose of data extraction.
The main defects are:
- The hard drive won’t switch on because the logic board is burnt out;
- The hard drive loses its partition table and data cannot be accessed;
- The so-called Bad Blocks: physical defects on the magnetic surface of the hard drive platters, caused by the impact of dust particles or media wear;
- Problems with the hard drive motor, making it impossible for the platters to rotate and the data to be read by the read heads;
- Reading head knocking: Usually caused by dropping, burning or breaking;
- Firmware problems: Firmware are programmes responsible for controlling the read heads. In other words, it’s the hardware’s software. If the hardware has a software problem, it simply won’t work;
- The computer’s BIOS doesn’t recognise the hard drive: It could be any of the above faults;
