Toshiba – Data Recovery Information

Toshiba Drive Problems

The biggest problem with Toshiba drives is the bad quality of the lubricant used on the bearings for some of the 2.5″ models – mostly GAX and GAS.

Common Symptoms:

– drive starts up with a loud buzzing / whirring / grinding / rattling noise , or it doesn’t spin and seems completely dead
– drive cannot be found in BIOS
– scratching or ticking may be heard
– attempting to boot up or read data from such a drive would give you hard drive errors such as:

“No operating system found”
“Primary Master Hard Disk Fail”
“S.M.A.R.T. Capable But Command Failed”
“USB Device malfunctioned”

This will make accessing the data impossible. In order to recover data, data recovery specialists will normally try to swap the platters; this is the most expensive job to do as it is the most difficult. However, some expert labs have technology that can fix these issues without having to open the drive, thus keeping costs down considerably.

Clicking, Sweeping, Knocking

Another typical symptom of Toshiba hard drives is a sweeping, knocking or clicking noise . The drive starts spinning and the heads begin to click. This is clearly a sign of a bad head, needing expert clean room treatment for data recovery to be successful.

Bad Sectors

Bad sectors are commonly found in all hard drive makes. After a certain period of time, the magnetic media that the platters are covered with begin to wear, resulting in bad sectors. When the drive hits this unreadable bad sector, it typically starts scratching, freezing, clicking and ticking. This causes even more damage to the surface, resulting in further data loss.

If you start to experience these symptoms while reading valuable files on your PC, stop the drive straight away and contact your nearest data recovery lab. Attempting to read any further data will just cause more problems. Once again, do not try to fix the problem at home!

Heads Sticking to Platter Surface

Usually heads are situated on a parking ramp located outside of the platters. Sometimes these heads can stay on the surface instead of going back to their parking positions. This may be due to a fall or incorrect termination. When the drive stops spinning, the heads stick to the smooth surface and unless you are an expert with the correct tools, it’s impossible to make them unstuck. A clean room environment is needed to open the drive and retrieve the data.

Again: do NOT try fixing this problem on your own – you will damage the surface and your data will be lost.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

You may use these <abbr title="HyperText Markup Language">HTML</abbr> tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

*