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Hard Drive Repair
Hard drive repair and data recovery often get lumped together, but they address very different challenges and processes. Hard drive repair focuses on restoring the drive’s physical and electronic systems such as fixing or replacing a damaged PCB, repairing or restoring corrupt firmware, or swapping out a failed head assembly so that the platters become readable again. Data recovery, by contrast, is the subsequent process of actually extracting and reconstructing your files once the drive is responsive. Without certain repair steps a drive that refuses to spin up or initialise simply can’t be accessed by recovery software or imaging tools.
How to tell if you can repair your hard drive?
Hard drives are complex devices. There are various different components inside, some electronic, some mechanical, some software-based. For the most part, it is only the electronic and very rare software (specifically firmware) components that can be replaced or repaired in order to repair a hard drive, bringing it back to life so that it can reliably be used again to store data.
Electronic hard drive repair
The main electonic component is called the printed circuit board (PCB). It contains various components such as the main controller, firmware ROM, cache, motor controller etc. A common cause of hard drive failure is when the incorrect power supply is connected, or the hard drive suffers a power surge. The PCB is often damaged causing the hard drive to become inoperable. If the damage is limited to the PCB, the unique firmware can be extracted from it and programmed to a new, identical PCB. In this manner we are able to perform hard drive repair and get the hard drive working again with all data intact.
Software hard drive repair
Hard drives need special software, called firmware, to run and perform their functions. Think of it as an operating system, similar to your cell phone or computer. Sometimes this firmware can fail which will lead to failure of the hard drive. Some of these firmware modules can be replaced or rebuilt so that the hard drive will function again. One common firmware module is called the ‘translator’. On hard drives which are otherwise healthy with a faulty translator, we can repair this hard drive by rebuilding the translator module.
Mechanical hard drive repair
The mechanical components are inside the main hard drive casing. The platter or platters store the actual data, whilst the head assembly has microscopic read and write heads which access and record data. Failures can happen due to bad luck or accidental damage such as a knock or fall. Because the tolerances are so small and the technology is so sensitive, once any damage has occurred it cannot be repaired to a state of reliability or stability again. Once a drive has bad sectors, faulty heads or any other internal issues, repair is not possible.
However, some form of hard drive repair does to happen to bring the drive to a point where our data recovery tools can stabilise the drive and recover the data. If a drive were to be dropped and suffer damaged heads, we would need to replace those heads in the lab and then perform multiple other steps to get the drive initialised again. So yes, some form of hard drive repair is required on a mechanical and internal level sometimes, but this is only for the purpose of data recovery, not reuse of the hard drive.
Hard drive repair in summary
The chances that your hard drive can be repaired if it has failed are most likely quite small. If you know that you connected the wrong power supply or experienced a power surge and your hard drive is now dead, then perhaps we can perform hard drive repair for you. A new PCB with firmware migration, and you should be good to go. However, often the damage can pass into the internals of the drive required a new head assembly too.
If the hard drive has degraded over time and developed bad sectors, it cannot be repaired. Yes, we can recover the data, but you’ll have to replace the hard drive. If it was dropped and sustained physical damage, once again, hard drive repair won’t be possible. There is a big different between hard drive repair and data recovery.
