How to Fix Hard Drive Crash

➢ Has your system slowed down lately?

➢ Do you hear a clicking sound coming from the system?

➢ Did you accidentally bump your laptop, and now it is not working?

The chances are that the hard drive has crashed. Damage to the data saving system is responsible for 70 percent of hard disk failures.

But the question is, can you recover the data from the damaged/corrupted hard disk drive?

Before answering this question, here are some eye-opening statistics published on Backblaze.

● 18% of drive failures are due to circuit board failures. Mostly, static electricity or moisture are responsible.

● 11% of the failures are from stiction (friction + sticking).

● Drive motor failures account for 1% of the failures.

These insights highlight the different types of disk failure. However, a hard drive crash is primarily of two types:

➢ Physical hard drive crash

➢ Logical hard drive crash

In this article, we will discuss disk failure along with their reasons in detail. We will also apprise you of how to fix hard drive crashes easily.

Physical Hard Drive Crash

Failure in the moving parts can spell a crash to the hard drive.

What causes a Physical Hard Drive Crash?

A physical part of the drive faces damage in a physical hard drive crash, either breakage or spoilage. It can happen due to several reasons.

Excessively hot environment: Heat can reduce your hard disk’s life. A temperature increase of a mere 5°C can reduce its life by almost two years affecting stability and performance. High drive temperatures above 60 seconds can drop the write speed by 50mb/s, increasing the number of errors.

Electricity: The hard drive runs on low DC power, just like your system. A surge in the power supply can damage the logic board (PCB) of the drive or cause a mechanical failure.

Note: PCB is the main component of the hard drive and is irreplaceable.

Moisture. The hard disk is moisture sensitive. High humidity or water spillage can condense over a period of time. This can lead to a short circuit and corrupt PCB. PCB, as we know, controls electricity on a hard disk.

Sudden impact. Dropping can cause a head crash to the drive taking the head closer to the drive platters making it lose its ability to work. Drop-offs increase the risk of losing internal data as well.

What are the symptoms of a Physical Hard Drive Crash?

If you want to know whether the damage is physical or not, look for the following symptoms.

Unrecognized/ Failure to mount. Your system fails to recognize the hard disk.

Clicking/Whirring sound. This sign is slightly tricky. You should be able to differentiate between the fan sound and the damaged hard drive. Please note, the sound of a crashed hard disk is like buzzing or crashing.

File corruption errors: You will receive this message frequently ‘error’.

Logical Hard Drive Crash

When your system fails to recognize the files, it indicates a logical hard drive crash. Although the drive runs normally, however, you could not read the data stored.

What are the causes of the Logical Hard Drive Crash?

Two ways can pave the way for Logical hard drive crashes.

Software, Viruses, malware, spyware: A virus can destroy the data stored to a level that cannot be overwritten or erased. While some viruses can change the BIOS settings so that HDD is non-recognizable, a few can even attack the motherboard.

Human Error: Accidentally deleting files is the most common cause of losing data. This kind of human error causes 50,000 hard disk drive failures in the US alone. Data loss can also happen due to wrong OS installation, changes to the system’s registry settings, and file attributes.

What are the symptoms of a Logical Hard Disk Crash?

Read the below-listed symptoms to ascertain that the crash is a logical hard drive crash.

Blue screen: Have you ever noticed a ‘blue screen’? This is apparently due to your logical hard drive crash.

Slow system: Your system is performing poorly. It has slowed down, or you may have lost some of the data.

Missing data: You may lose some or all the files stored in the hard drive.

While it may be impossible to recover a file damaged physically, logical crashes can be rectified to make your hard drive run again.

How to recover data from the crashed logical disk?

Think before you proceed. There are several ways you can consider recovering data. However, do not try to do it yourself. It needs expertise.

So, what is the best way to fix a crashed hard drive?

Try the following: The methods are tested and have proven results.

Run an antivirus scan: You may have lost data due to some malware or viruses. Take out the hard drive and insert it into another computer. Scan. This process is capable of repairing the HDD and making it accessible for you.

CHKDSK scan: It is available for Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows 8 or Windows 8.1. You must do it often. It scans the filesystem and thereby fixes logical errors that may come across.

SFC scan: It scans all the corrupted files and even replaces the corrupted field with a copy (cashed) lying in a compressed folder. Depending on your system configuration, the entire SFC scan can take up to one hour.

Employ a Data Recovery Tool: If nothing from the above works, think of using a data recovery tool. Most of the recovery tools are capable of restoring files from the corrupted hard disk drives. The software is capable of restoring files even from excessively formatted or corrupted files.

Use a data recovery tool such as Recoverit.

Wondershare Recoverit is a professional recovery tool that can help you retrieve files, videos, photos, emails, audios, and more with extreme ease. Post recovery, you can restore these to your Mac, PC, hard drive, USB, SD card, etc. Also, it supports a range of devices, including drones, action cameras, DSLR, digital cameras, camcorders, dash cams, SD card, HDD, etc.

It performs data recovery in three simple yet effective steps:

#1. Install and Launch

Download the Recoverit data recovery tool and install it on your computer.

● Choose location

Recoverit displays all the hard drives detected. Choose the hard drive you want to store your data. Click on the ‘Start’ button.

#2. Scan and preview

Recoverit will start scanning the hard drive. After the completion, you can check the recovered data.

If it misses the data you are looking for, then try “All-Around Recovery”. This mode would search for your files deeply from the hard disk drive. This procedure takes slightly more time than the previous scan.

#3. Data Back

Once the scan is over, preview the field recovered from the results. You may select the file you want and click ‘recover’ to get them back.

It is suggested that you save all the recovered data to another storage device other than the crashed hard disk drive.

Try Professional hard Disk Drive Data Recovery Tool

You must accept that hard disk drive crashes are commonplace. Stop dwelling on them and take. There are numerous ways to retrieve it. The most effective is a data recovery tool.

Recoverit offers a high data recovery success rate. It can help you receive in just a few simple steps. Moreover, it is a free tool that offers an opportunity to fix your hard drive and retrieve your data for free.