Is computer internal hard drives repairable?

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
T

Thor159

Commendable
Dec 29, 2016
117
0
1,690
My PC hard drive suddenly crashed. Now its not booting up. I want to know that hard drives can be repaired or I will have to buy new one.
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
smorizio

smorizio

Titan
Jan 22, 2010
30,984
9
125,315
there two parts to a hard drive. the pbc (logic board) and the heads and platters. if the drive sound ok but the controller failed you can sometime do a board swap and get your data off. if the drive sounds like a lawnmower/grinder or clicking. then the heads/platters are damaged. to fix those you have to spend big bucks at a data recovery lab. if it was a virus or other issue try plugging the drive into another pc see if you can see your data or try a prgram like recovia for ccleaner. see if it see any of the data. if not your data gone.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Ra_V_en

Ra_V_en

Honorable
Jan 17, 2014
1,296
0
11,960
Above answer partially cover it.
As said it can be PCB related issue, which is not common but it happen, then there is logical or physical issue on the platters. Logical issues were common of FAT32 partitions back in the days, you could loose some data due some power shortage. Nowadays newer drives and NTFS handles this better but the chance still exist, hence that's why chkdsk command still exist.

First of all, is the drive visible in the bios? If yes then it's very unlikely this is a PCB issue.
Second step depends of do you want to try to recover any data or not. This would require different path to be taken.
If you want to try to recover something then you would need additional drive to boot to a working OS and try to use some recovery software or try to get a bootable CD/flash drive with some diagnostics and recovery software. Not sure what is used lately, since I'm not up to date but there were Hiren's Boot's and Windows PE's for this specific usage.
If you don't want to recover anything then i would try to boot Windows Installer from DVD/flashdrive and check if you are able to find that drive, delete all partitions, make a new one and format it.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Sakkura

Sakkura

Illustrious
Aug 22, 2011
8,129
3
37,965
In theory yes, they can be repairable. In practice it's not worth it in 99.9% of cases, and there's very little infrastructure built up for it - there aren't HDD repair centres all over the place, because people are better off just buying a new one instead of repairing an old one.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Ra_V_en

Ra_V_en

Honorable
Jan 17, 2014
1,296
0
11,960
Yes they will ask a shitloads of money for recovery depending of how deep your pocket is and how hard it's to recover it. I'm not joking, this kind of low level data recovery is only worth for companies with fragile data not for personal use generally.
How old is your drive... still on warranty? If it's not showing in the bios then I'd RMA it if it's sill on warranty or forget it and get a new drive. Honestly, I got skill to swap a PCB on old drives but finding exact same revision of PCB is horribly hard and even then success rate is not worth the hassle.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
M

Marvin2984

Prominent
Mar 4, 2017
1
0
510


In my opinion a hard drive is only worth trying to "repair" in order to retrieve data that you find of very high value (such as all of the pictures of your kids, which you failed to backup before the drive died). Once a hard drive starts having problems I would not trust it to work reliably ever again except in the case of a bad controller board which could be replaced. I how ever would not spend the time, effort, and money to swap out the controller board (which might not fix the problem anyway) unless I had data worth its weight in gold (um wait bad analogy, you get the idea though).

For data recovery I've found using a CD Boot disk with Linux (such as Ubuntu) is a good way to access data from a Windows drive that is not working (as in the OS is not booting, or it has viruses). Just plug in a USB drive and copy the data from the bad drive.

 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom