Can internal damage to a hard disk drive cause it to go undetected in the BIOS?

[nick003]

I have a Western Digital 1 TB SATA hard drive model WD10EARS which began clicking after a short fall out of a tower and to the table top on which it was working.

There are no visible signs of damage to the drive. It will not boot and goes unrecognized by the bios.

That it is unrecognized would suggest the PCB is bad. I thought that perhaps the PCB shifted when the drive hit the table top and tried re-seating it, but no luck.

I'm wondering: can internal damage to a drive cause it to go undetected by the bios?

Thank you in advance...

Nick

 

[jnkweaver]

Absolutely.

 

[nick003]

Ok...

So my next question would be:

If I was to open the drive and look inside, what sort of damage might I see? There doesn't seem to be much going on inside a drive. What "physical" damage might there be which wold cause the drive to go unrecognized in the bios?

 

[jnkweaver]

You couldn't fix it even if you could open it without breaking it. It could be the interface board or could be the physical drive. The platters ahave to be perfectly balanced and the heads an exact distance from the platters. This is all done in clean rooms as even a speck of dust can ruin a hard drive.

The only thing you can do is try it out in a different machine and see if it is recognized.

 

[nick003]

There are many video tutorials available on line from reputable sources. Data recover companies scare you into thinking that clean rooms are essential and that the smallest spec of dust can be devastating.

For long term, reliable data storage, I believe this to be correct. To get a drive up and running for the purpose of data recovery, I think opening the drive is fine.

Some of the videos I've seen are from companies who sell parts and tools to do your own repairs.

I remember back in the day: some guy posted step by step instructions on a bulletin board that alleged to help you upgrade a 28.8 modem to 56K. It turned out to be bogus; countless people ruined their modems.

Unless that is the same thing going on in these instructional videos, there are many that show successful head replacement and platter swapping into donor drives for the purpose of data recovery.

That being said, lets talk about the "THEORY" of in home, hard drive repair...

Lets suppose you had a clean room at your disposal. You have a source for parts and tools...

You've determined the cause of your problem is internal damage... what are you looking for?

 

[jnkweaver]

Well you are looking for a head that is out of alignment. An obvious scratch on a platter.

Past those two things I am at a loss.

 

[nick003]

I would agree... I think it is a head alignment issue. I wonder how to determine if they are out of alignment and if so, how do repair centers realign them?

 

[nick003]

Will the new drive come with all the data I had on the old one? No. My question isn't about diagnosing and replacing a bad drive; its about recovering data on the bad drive and then restoring it to a new one.

 

[ramond3]

use sata to usb cable or any enclosure for the dead hdd,then plug it on a mac-apple computer then copy/paste to its desktop to retrieve all the data.then use imaging software from that brand of hdd just to be sure for transferring to a new hdd

 

[ramond3]

..then go to f8 for 'repair' (it maybe in the advance options) windows.click on it.then go to system recovery,find D: recovery partition to boot windows reinstallation.or if you have created a 'system repair disk' use them 'to repair windows and find system recovery,usually on drive: D

 

[KalTorak]

I would agree... I think it is a head alignment issue. I wonder how to determine if they are out of alignment and if so, how do repair centers realign them?

With a fair bit of skill and prior training.

If the heads are out of alignment I would say you are SOL.

When you put power to the drive does it spin up?