Date Added: May 07, 2014 05:25:53 AM

In this article I will first explain different kinds of hard drives and then I will talk about the repairing procedure of these hard disks. I have also discussed different kinds of hard drive problems.

A hard drive is a computer part which is used to store data. Every computer has some kind of hard disk in it. A PC or Mac computer has three kinds of hard drives. An old type is called an IDE drive, a SATA drive. SATA has more transfer and processing speed. These drives are being used in computer laptops, desktops, Mac computers, MacBooks etc. Both IDE and SATA drives have moving parts for data processing. The newest form is the solid state drive which is getting poplar these days. Computer servers also use SCSI drives for data storage.

Some people think that a computer tower is a hard drive which is not correct. The hard drive is actually installed inside a computer tower or desktop. These drives come in three physical sizes i.e. 2.5”, 3.5” and 1.8”. The 3.5” and 1.8” are used in laptop, netbook and MacBook while 3.5” can be found in PC desktop and Apple’s Mac desktops. They come in different capacities like 250GB, 320GB, 500GB, 1TB etc. These days the hard drives are coming in big sizes like 4TB and I am sure it will go on. Laptop hard drives are not that fast. The maximum they go is 1 or 2 TB.

When a hard drive stops working, the computer won’t turn on. Most of the time, the drive will make a clicking sound or it will beep. This indicates that the drive has physically failed. Other times, the drive won’t make any sound but it will not work because of a mechanical or bad sector problem. The hard disk can also create problem when a virus attacks it. Some other situations may be a bad or burnt component on the drive, bad data or power cable or bad controller on the motherboard.

So what needs to be done to repair a hard disk? Well, it depends on the problem. If the motherboard controller is bad, the drive can be installed in a USB enclosure and can be checked with a different computer or laptop. This way data can be recovered by transferring it to the other computer. If a hard drive has a bad or burnt connection, then the electronic board can be replaced. This process used to work with very old media but not any more. The software needs to be transferred from broken board to the new board. This needs special skills. This can be done with the help of special machines. This process is one of the methods of data recovery. If a drive is infected with a virus, it will be very easy to recover or repair it by cleaning viruses. In case of bad sectors, special software can be used to it.

The next situation is the most practical and complicated one. Hard drives with internal problem like beeping or clicking can be a challenge. Repair at this stage is called advanced data recovery. In this method, a donor drive is used to transplant parts into the patient drive and data is recovered this way. All this is done in dust free environment and very advanced skills are needed to do the job properly. Sometimes drives are combined into a raid array. In such situations, the individual drives are repaired first and then raid is reconstructed to extract data. This process is called raid data recovery. SSD drives are also included in this complicated group. The more there are memory chips, the harder it is to repair or recover solid state drives.

In this article, I explained about types of traditional hard drives, kinds of failure and the repair process known as data recovery. I have talked about all aspects of a hard drive like how drives die, what are their physical sizes, how these drives can be brought back to life and more.

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