How To Diagnose A Broken Hard Drive

If you find yourself experiencing a broken hard drive then there some ways for you to diagnose where the fault lies. This article takes a look at the software and hardware checks you can do before calling in the experts.

Sometimes the simplest diagnosis will be the most obvious. If you know for a fact that you have dropped, flooded or damaged the drive in some way and it is no longer working with your computer then you can only resort to data recovery experts to complete any computer maintenance and repair actions (including data recovery from the broken hard drive).

Mechanical faults normally manifest themselves in out of place sounds from the broken hard drive. If the broken hard disk is making a grinding noise then you probably have seized the mechanical heads or the bearings are being blocked. A rattling noise indicates that there are components loose in the drive.

If you are less sure of what is causing the issue then you should do the following checks to establish if there are any software faults.

Look at the BIOS settings for your drive to establish if the broken hard drive is being properly detected. If not, then investigate correct settings for the drive. If the disk is not even being recognized by the BIOS then there is no chance for using data recovery software to salvage files.

For broken hard drives inside your PC, check the IDE ribbon is properly connected along with the power cable. This will be trickier to do for a laptop hard drive (and less likely to occur). For a broken external hard drive, check/swap the USB cable and make sure the power cable (if used) is not damaged.

If the BIOS detects the drive, then you may be able to use data recovery software to scan the drive. If the broken hard disk is corrupted then most software can still recover files for you.