Some common problems for Harddisk
Head problem
A quite common symptom drives have is clicking, knocking or beeping sound. Clicking may cause by head broken, firmware corrupt or PCB problem, it is very important to perform accurate diagnostics what the particular problem is. Generally speaking, the drive spins up and the head starts clicking right from the beginning with a regular constant sound, most often this is a sign of bad heads.
Bad sector problem
There is one more problem that is typical for all manufactured hard drives: bad sectors. After some period of time magnetic media the platters are covered with starts to degrade and bad sectors appear. Whenever the drive hits such unreadable bad sector it could start freezing, scratching, ticking and sometimes loud clicking. This leads to further damage to the surface and causes more data loss, but if you want to recover data, you needn’t fix these defects; in the past, we usually use special tools image all HDD, but it may cost much time, especially in the times when the drive’s capacity is more and more larger. Fortunately, Data Compass with shadow disk technology would help us solve that problem easiest.
PCB & ROM problem
The other most common problems hard drives experience is PCB. It may overheat, power surges and streaks. Often bad power supply unit combined with power streak is usually enough to fry spindle driver chip on the electronics and make the data inaccessible or the drive couldn’t spin up. For different HDD, swap PCB has different principle, for example, WD HDD you should make the ROM match as ATA mod, and for HITAHCI HDD you should match the NVRAM first.
The typical problem for each brand
Maxtor
Firmware problem
Maxtor hard drives are well-known for their firmware problems. If one of the modules becomes corrupted the whole hard drive micro-operating system can't boot up, the drive can't initialize correctly and stops working. If this situation occurs the drive becomes identified with its factory alias (N40P, CALYPSO, SABRE, GRIZZLY etc) quote often with 0 capacity.
P list problem
A seriously error condition is the P list broken, for other drives, P-list broken usually means all data lost, but for Maxtor drive, it has a backup P-list, so we could backup this mod and re-generation the P-list, then the data will come back.
SA-C for Maxtor drive
Like HITACHI drive, Maxtor also has a SA-C, it exist on all 6Y posterior series and some 6E series, but different with HITACHI, you couldn’t use the SA-C firmware to repair the broken firmware in SA-A, it just used as SA-C seflscan. If you upload this firmware, it may cause many unknown problem.
WD
Firmware problem
In such case the drive usually spins up fine, it doesn't click but has one of the following symptoms:
It is not found in BIOS at all
Identifies with its factory alias(for example WDC ROM MODEL-MAMMOTH---,WDC ROM MODEL-HAWK---),
Shows up with wrong S/N (for example WDC-ROM SN# XYZ---) or capacity,
Identifies fine but fails to read any data or boot up operating system giving I/O device errors whenever you try to access sectors.
To repair the firmware problem, we need prepare a donor PCB and swap it, match the ATA and ROM, and then fix the broken mods.
Defect list problem
If the Defect list was broken for WD drive, it may cause the drive couldn’t be recognized or all “!!!!” symbol ATA / ROM content damage
HITACHI
Firmware problem
Inimitable, HITACHI has another Service Area called SA-C; in this area store some backup firmware which could upload to SA-A replace the broken mods, which means we needn’t waste time anymore to try to find the donor drive. If the drive didn’t work which caused by the firmware corrupt, first load from file and then check the broken mods, then switch SA-A to SA-C and backup the mods from C area and upload it to A area, it would be ok.
PS: if you want to find the donor drive, it’s very easy, just require the same series and capacity would be ok.
Be protect
That’s a very common condition in HITACHI drive, HDD WAS LOCKED, for this problem, we also need switch to SA-C first, then backup the password mod (depend on different series: PSWD/ICES/SECI) from C-area, them upload it to A-area, the drive will free.
NVRAM problem
Sometimes we need swap the PCB between HITACHI drives, we can try to swap PCB from another drive of the same model but the drive would work still. Moreover, donor board could "lock" itself causing a good working donor drive not to spin. The problem is that logic board on modern hard drive is adapted to the head disk assembly it was manufactured with. That info is stored in a small chip called NVRAM, so after we swapped PCB, we need to do NV MATCH first. Backup the NV file from donor drive, swap PCB to patient drive, then do NV match, the drive would work well.
PS: for 3.5’ HDD, just choose “Dynamic repair” button could repair this problem.
Seagate
Seagate Barracuda drives, and especially 7200.7, 7200.8, 7200.9 and 7200.10 series have a very common problem with heads. Seagate introduced new technology in this line - special coating for the platters that was supposed to protect magnetic layer. But in fact it caused more problems than protection. Under special conditions this coating starts to flake and tiny bits of this substance stick to the head read/write elements. Reading becomes more and more unstable, the drive starts losing tracks and at some point typical symptoms or bad heads appear - clicking, knocking, sweeping sounds
Another common issue with Seagate hard drives is damage to the components on the cirquit board(PCBA). Hard drives in general are very vulnerable to overheating, power spikes and surges. Bad power supply unit combined with power streak is usually enough to burn spindle motor controller driver(SMOOTH chip) on the logic board. If this occurs the computer would reboot itself or shutdown completely, you would normally notice acrid smell and when powered on the drive would not spin up at all.
Non-spinning could also be a symptom of seized motor on multi-platter Seagate Barracuda drives. The drive would also make buzzing sound like it's trying to spin up. Data recovery in this case requires transplanting platters from bad drive into donor in clean room environment.
Seagate laptop Momentus drives also share some typical 2.5 inch HDD problems. One of them is heads sticktion to the platter surface
There is one more problem that is typical for all hard drives: bad sectors. After some period of time magnetic media the platters are covered with starts to degrade and bad sectors develop.
Whenever the drive hits such unreadable bad sector it could start scratching, freezing, ticking and sometimes loud clicking This leads to further damage to the surface and causes more data loss
For other External Harddisk Brand such as LaCie,Buffalo,Freecom … all use above Brand harddisk inside and the failures all same too.
  
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