No noise, no light, just nothing. A complete lack of sound is its own category of diagnosis. And this can be better news for you than a noisy failure, because most of the time a completely silent drive will indicate that either your electronic parts have failed or your mechanics have frozen up, not that you’ve lost your data. We find out which it is for free, then give you a fixed quote.
Destroyed electronics: there is a high voltage in the system causing the electronic protection devices located on the printed circuit board (PCB) of the drive to be destroyed in an attempt to absorb this high voltage, allowing the drive’s disks to remain unharmed. Mechanical failure: the spindle will no longer rotate (either because bearings have failed, or the head is sticking to the disk platter as a result of being knocked against something). The drive may appear to be powered but never spin up, sometimes with a faint “tick” or “buzz”, indicating that it was making some sort of attempt to operate. Failure of firmware to provide identification: the drive spins, makes decisions about what to do next, and then refuses to identify itself. In this case, the drive appears to be operational, but is unable to communicate electronically with your computer: its internally stored operating software has been damaged. Each of these has its own repair route, and none of them is improved by trying other cables, other computers or another day.
The internet’s popular “swap the circuit boards” method of recovering dead hard drives has been non-functional for approximately twenty years. Modern hard drives are designed with adaptive data stored in the board’s circuitry, calibrated to the drive’s head and disk surface, which is unique to each specific hard drive manufactured. This information (adaptives) was written by the manufacturer during the manufacturing process. When the board used in a repair swap does not contain this information, either the repaired hard drive will be inoperable or will provide incorrect read results due to misaligned calibrations. Electronic recovery properly repairs your original board or transfers the adaptive IC to a replacement board. Transferring the adaptive IC is done at the component level, thus returning your hard drive to exact specifications. If you have previously attempted to perform a board swap, there is no need to feel embarrassed. Please send all items including both boards.
Yes, quite often. It is also a pretty good fault to get: most likely when you have a surge it will take out all of your protective electronics on your board and leave your platters intact. The adaptive data is carried across from the drive for repairing at the board level; then we just image like usual. Do not test this on an alternative PSU “just to see”.
If there is a buzzing or ticking noise without a spin-up, most times this indicates that your motor is trying to function but cannot. This can be due to either bad bearings or heads stuck to the surface of your platter. This is a mechanical problem, not an electronic one. Repeated application of power to the drive may damage those parts which are needed to survive. Off, box, send it in.
And that’s sometimes true, which is one reason it’s just the first couple of minutes of our free diagnostic service rather than something you’d pay us to do. External drive users: we see more failures with the enclosure (the casing around the internal components) than with the hard disk itself. So whatever happens, you’ll find out for £0.