It appears as though a completely inactive drive (no spin, no lights, no activity detected) indicates total failure. However, mechanically it almost never is complete failure: ‘dead’ is a common symptom which has four typical causes, and three of them typically represent a very recoverable situation. Each possible cause will help determine what action should be taken next. Start at the top of the decision tree.
Identify what feeds the drive; then identify what is running it; then find out what spins it. In most cases ‘dead’ hard disk drives are in one of the top two categories, those that are inexpensive.
First go where it won’t cost anything. Power and connection: try a different SATA power connector on a desktop. Try a different USB cable on an external unit. Cables are known to be one of the most frequently failing components of computer systems and a failed cable looks identical to a failed drive. Next try using a different port on the same machine. Be sure to avoid connecting to unpowered hubs, and don’t connect to any front panel ports that may have difficulty supplying enough power to support the power requirements of a desktop class external unit. The enclosure: an external unit contains a bare hard drive and a small circuit board called a USB bridge board. The USB bridge boards die much more commonly than the hard drives themselves. In addition, if you feel comfortable you could also try running the bare drive in a docking station or another enclosure. However, there’s a critical caveat before proceeding: some external units (most notably several WD branded enclosures) include encryption capabilities provided by the USB bridge board. As such, retain the original enclosure even when it appears dead, as the board contained within this enclosure may be required for data recovery. If you’re not interested in disassembling your enclosure, note that these tests are among the initial steps performed by our complimentary diagnostics.
When a drive draws power but is silent (no spin-up noise), this can indicate that there has probably been a loss of the circuit board inside the drive. Power surges, reversing an external drive’s adapter or damaged components will kill the protection diodes or controller chips on the board quickly. These repairs are genuine bench work. However, the modern issue is the calibration data stored in the ROM chip specific to its drive. If your own board can’t be repaired, the calibration data needs to be transferred either into a new ROM chip installed into a replacement board or moved to a working board. Never replace blindly. Surge-killed drives will routinely restore to full readability when done correctly. The details can be found on our won’t-power-on page.
Mechanical failures will give off signals as well. A faint hum or buzz with no spin-up indicates the motor is attempting to start and cannot, often from dropping the unit causing bearings to seize or heads being welded onto the platter. Beeping or whining from a drive (the motor whining due to resistance) is also from the same group. Spin then clicking indicates that the drive is functioning (alive) but lost; that is the clicking guide’s territory. Transplant work involves replacing the motor or head assemblies. Imaging requires care, but again, no good comes from repeatedly powering on a stuck head dragging it around a platter. Your first power on indicated symptoms; your second is for the bench. Our hard drive recovery service, beginning with a complimentary 48-hour diagnostic and a fixed written quote, is available.
It is very unlikely that the data is gone. ‘Dead’ refers to how the hard drive behaves (as opposed to what has happened to the files on the disks). Typically the file storage (the platter(s) or chip(s)) remains unaffected by whichever component may have failed. Components will be repaired. Motors and heads replaced. And then the contents will be imaged. Drives that die completely due to hardware failure are rare. Drives that die when someone tries to repair them themselves are less rare.
For external hard drives, very often. This is the one test worth performing. The USB bridge board within an enclosure typically fails much sooner than the disk drive housed within. First try using a different cable and using a powered port. Beyond this point, remove the bare drive from its enclosure and connect it to another docking station or enclosure, or if the drive matters enough, and you would prefer not to disassemble it, bring it in with it still enclosed. We will perform both actions for no charge as part of our diagnostic process.
It is the most popular piece of advice you’ll find about fixing hard disk drives and it’s useless for today’s drives: all of the data required for calibrating a hard drive are stored in a very small read-only memory (ROM) chip located on its printed-circuit board. The ROM chip contains information that’s specific to that particular drive. When you swap out the printed circuit board from one drive with another, if the ROM chips don’t contain identical information, the drive will fail to operate properly. In some cases, this can cause the drive to spin incorrectly. Board-level repair works; blind board-swapping doesn’t.
The free 48-hour diagnostic done in our lab will help determine where in this process the failure occurred as well as what steps we can take to retrieve data from the failed unit.