It's highly likely that every user of computer equipment will, at one time or another, have to deal with data loss due to a hard drive failure. Indeed, no hard drive is infallible...
As the market leader in data recovery, Ontrack can solve the majority of problems encountered when a hard drive fails, whether as a result of a hard drive crash or unintentional data erasure. Contact our specialists to find out more about our range of services and data recovery software.
Physical hard drive failures
Physical failures are considered the most severe, as they are generally characterized by the hard disk not functioning.
They result in several specific symptoms:
In the case of a physical failure, the data contained on the storage medium is inaccessible due to a mechanical or electronic problem related to one of the hard disk's multiple components. This kind of problem is commonly called a hard disk crash.
Electronic panel
Electrical shock is the typically the main cause of electronic failure in hard drives. In these cases, the hard disk's integrated circuits (PCB) have been damaged by a voltage spike, for example. It is then necessary to replace or repair the hard disk's PCB before data recovery can be performed. Hard drive repair and data recovery are carried out in a cleanroom environment to ensure an optimum success rate.
Mechanical panel
There are several causes of mechanical failure, including:
- Read/write head crash: the read/write heads have damaged the magnetic surface of the disc, resulting in data loss.
- Physical deformation of discs.
- Damaged motor leading to rotation problem, disk symmetry problem,
- Mechanical failure can occur after a shock, a natural disaster or through normal wear and tear of the hard disk.
Important : For all cases of physical hard drive failure, don't try to repair your hard drive yourself, you may risk losing all your data! Only data recovery experts with the right equipment will be able to repair the hard drive to perform lost data recovery.
Logical hard drive failures
Logical failures are quite often the least severe for a hard drive, as the storage medium still functions but certain files or data are inaccessible. A logical failure can generally be resolved without performing a cleanroom recovery or exchange/repair of one of the hard drive's components.
There are many causes of logical failures, the main ones being:
- Faulty partition tables / corrupted file system.
- hard-disk-formatting, file deletion or data erasure.
- Loss of a hard disk partition.
- Computer virus, ransomware: system corrupted following a virus attack.
Logical failures are very often linked to human error: the user formatted a drive without backing up their files, accidental deletion, or a downloaded file contained a virus that corrupted the file structure...but in all the above examples, the storage medium is not physically damaged.
In many cases, logical failures can be resolved using one of our data recovery software packages, but for the most severe cases, our experts are on hand to solve your problem.
Our unique remote recovery service can also enable you to recover your files quickly and efficiently via a simple internet connection. Don't hesitate to contact us at for more information on our data recovery software and services.
Diagnosing hard drive failure without making it worse
Interview with Martin Hiller, Ontrack cleanroom manager.
Through research of their own, many computer users today find out what to do in the event of physical hard drive failure on the internet from specialist sites, blogs, forums, etc. rather than contacting a data recovery service provider directly. In many cases, they download and attempt to use highly specialized tools to access hard disks, even physically damaged ones, after unsuccessfully trying data recovery software.
Martin, what do you think?
Mr. Hiller : You're right, there are a lot of tools for "repairing" hard drives that have suffered physical failure, which are freely available on the internet. But since some of them can actually access the drive at a lower level, they are also, in a way, dangerous tools. When you don't know exactly what you're doing, you can do a lot of damage to your drive and the data it contains.
In a large number of cases, when the hard drive stops working, the drive has been dropped, resulting in a shock to the read head. In such cases, there's absolutely nothing an ordinary user can do. Other cases are - and they occur most often - when the strength of the magnetic field at a specific point on the coated plate is no longer sufficiently high and the data can no longer be read or has completely disappeared. Then the hard disk's automatic failure reduction comes into play: if the specific hard disk's failure reduction fails to resolve these read failures, it will write error logs in its error table. The more errors the hard disk finds, the more error logs it will write to the table. If there are too many errors, the table will be covered and this will prevent the hard disk from starting.
What can the user do in this case?
Mr. Hiller : Honestly, it's best to consider contacting a data recovery expert. I know there are several very specialized free tools available on the internet to access the hard drive error table. With these tools, the user is able to access the so-called service area of the hard disk and the table of errors and anomalies. But I strongly recommend not to proceed in this way without the appropriate knowledge.
For what reasons?
Mr. Hiller : With these tools, it's possible to reset or even delete the error table. The error table is made up of two different lists : the growing error table (G-List) and the P-error table (P-List). In simple terms, the P-List contains information about permanently defective sectors (bad sectors) on the drive, where data can no longer be stored as these sectors are forbidden from access by the operating system. The G-List saves information about sectors that have become corrupted during disk use. While it's possible to delete the G-List without affecting the data, knowing that it's still on the same disk space, you can make data recovery difficult by changing or deleting an item on the P-List. By doing so, you automatically modify the addresses of the files stored on the disk. If you're lucky, your drive will reboot and your data will be somewhere else on the disk; if not, your drive still won't boot and your files will be harder for an expert to locate. In many cases, once the P-List has been "corrected", it's almost impossible to access the drive again.
Some tools offer the option of uploading another P-List from a hard drive of the same brand to make it start up again and access the drive through the computer's operating system. If this doesn't work, a data recovery specialist can still, in most cases, recover the drive and stored data. But this depends on the case.
What do you recommend?
Mr. Hiller : If you're an ordinary user - at home or even in a company's IT department - and you don't want to make data recovery your business, you should not attempt to repair the hard drive yourself, even if you have the most specialized tools available on the market. Chances are your efforts will be in vain, and your data will be irretrievably lost.
But the best advice is still to use the S.M.A.R.T. normal tools provided by your hard drive and to frequently check the quality of your drive, as well as its life expectancy. If there are too many bad sectors and the life expectancy is very low, it's definitely time to recover and back up your data, and buy a new drive. This way, you avoid problems and the risk of losing data.
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