Toshiba drives show up most of all in two areas: inside laptops (Satellite, Portégé, where the older models have turned into ageing hardware, and many devices made by other manufacturers that include a Toshiba drive), and in Canvio external drives. These are both 2.5″ drives, and like all 2.5″ drives, they tend to fail differently than other types of drives.
Most Toshiba data recovery cases involve either 2.5″ laptop hard drives or the Canvio portable disk line (which is also a 2.5″ disk in a plastic enclosure). Some Toshiba cases may include 3.5″ desktop hard drive models as well as enterprise disk models used in servers; however, by far most of the cases will involve one of these two smaller form factor hard drives. It makes sense why this matters since a 2.5″ portable hard drive is the type of drive most likely to be dropped, and dropping a powered-on and actively spinning 2.5″ hard drive is the single worst possible way you can damage it. The heads of the drive hit against the platters and the clicking begins.
First comes impact damage: these drives live on your lap, in bags and on desks. If it was dropped while powered on and now clicks, turn it off immediately and do not switch it back on. Each time you do power it on, it will drag damaged heads across the surface of the disk. Next is age-related wear. Laptop drives run hot. They get carried around. Eventually the heads will weaken or sectors will go bad. Then you have a machine that freezes, takes minutes to open a folder and blue-screens under load. Finally, when it comes to Canvio external drives (as with any external), sometimes the fault isn’t even the disk at all but the bridge board or power supply. You’ve got a perfectly healthy disk trapped behind dead electronics. That is genuinely good news and part of what the free diagnostic establishes.
When a laptop is no longer working (and the user thinks they’ve lost their data), there are actually two questions. The first question is what happened to the computer (dead motherboard, broken screen, etc.); the second question is how to get your data back. If a laptop’s motherboard has died, a screen has been damaged from an accident with a drink or if the laptop won’t turn on for some other reason, there is still a good chance that all the data stored on a perfectly fine Toshiba hard drive may be recovered. That’s because it is easy to remove a hard drive from a non-functioning laptop, image the drive and recover all of your files. At this point it does not matter if the laptop will work again or not. If the Toshiba hard drive itself has failed (clicking, undetected, throwing read errors), that is a recovery in its own right. From the outside the two look identical, which is why the diagnosis comes first, free, before anyone quotes you anything.
Software can only assist in recovery of data on a drive which has suffered no physical damage, where there has been some loss of files (i.e., those deleted by mistake) due to the logical corruption of the file system, a possible format, etc. The software will not be able to help you if your drive’s read/write head fails. In addition, the software will not allow you to access a drive which the computer itself can’t see. On a Toshiba that has stopped functioning after being dropped, for example, and is now producing a loud click when you try to run the software, it can do irreparable harm as the scanning process continues to keep the drive spinning and working on damaged areas of the drive; what would otherwise have been a recoverable problem becomes an unrecoverable one. Using chkdsk on a disk with bad sectors will cause the disk to labour over those very same bad sectors. If your drive produces new noises while operating, cease all use immediately and have the drive imaged prior to attempting to recover data from the drive.
We always diagnose before we begin. When mechanical failure occurs (and this will be the case if you have a bad head), we will need to match donor heads with the damaged ones. If your Canvio bridge board has died, then we can read the data off of your Canvio using its own read/write mechanisms. A failed sector doesn’t necessarily mean we cannot recover it: we use some form of disk imaging software that uses hardware designed to work gently and slowly through those areas. Once we’ve created an image of the disk, the recovered data will be restored from that image as opposed to being restored from the potentially very fragile original. Whether your drive arrived as a bare disk, installed in an external drive enclosure, or still installed into a laptop, our steps remain identical. A user who immediately powered down their system after they experienced problems should generally expect a routine hard drive recovery job rather than a difficult one.
Clicking after a drop on your Toshiba, or a Canvio that won’t mount? Turn it off and leave it off. Our diagnostics are free, we provide fixed quotes in writing in advance of doing anything to help you, and in most cases there is no charge for any service unless you receive your data back. For fair and honest advice ring 0113 322 3083 (also free). After receiving a quote over the phone or via the form above, just drop it in to us at our Leeds office on Albion Street (you don’t need an appointment) or send it to us insured from anywhere within Yorkshire.