How to repair corrupted hard disk?

Portable hard drives are an essential tool for many, whether large business files or regular backups, there are few professionals who don’t carry a hard drive in their backpack or suitcase. Unfortunately, it could get hit or have an accident and stop working. Is it possible to repair a damaged external hard drive?

One of the reasons many people use external hard drives instead of SSDs is that the price of storage is much lower and protecting important data is more important than speed of access. Especially if we are professionals, we can find data that we need to keep in the long term, such as invoices and waybills from our customers, document type evidence if we are conducting an investigation, etc. we need to backup on hard disk.

Also, if we are a Chromebook or ultralight laptop type computer user, we will always need additional storage as these computers do not come with large storage spaces. What if the external hard drive is damaged by an accident? Obviously, a lot of important data is lost.

Why do hard drives crash?

Before explaining how to recover information, we must understand that hard drives are very sensitive pieces of hardware. For it to work properly, its different parts, such as the head where the information on the disc is recorded, the arm and needle that reads and records the data, must be placed in very precise positions between them. All these parts need to be aligned in a certain way, and if they are not aligned they will stop working.

Therefore, 99% of the failure of an external hard drive will be the result of an impact that dislodges these important parts. The consequences of a simple blow, for example, if the lever is misaligned, can scratch important parts of the recording and cause information loss in the process.

Since the hard drive is a very delicate mechanical part, our recommendation is to contact a dedicated data recovery service. Another advice we give you is to keep a large-capacity fixed storage in a fixed place like your home office or office and regularly empty the data on the external hard drive in case the external hard drive fails.

Solutions for a damaged hard disk

The solutions we present to you below have nothing to do with SSD storage, so they do not apply to such devices. That’s why we decided to focus on what HDD or mechanical hard drives are.

Broken external drive not recognized by PC

It is possible that, after a blow, our damaged external hard drive will not work due to the breakdown of its interface and power supply. We must not forget that external hard drives are nothing more than an internal hard drive packed inside a box. Therefore, they often include a SATA to USB converter inside, but this is not always the case, and there are manufacturers that do not use standard interfaces for their internal and external hard drives, but rather proprietary interfaces.

So if you open an external hard drive case and find an internal SATA type interface, then you are lucky, since then you can connect it to the same type of interface and transfer data to PC. If you are a laptop user, you can use an external SATA to USB 3.0 converter like the one shown below:

With this, it is possible for you to discover that the bad part on your external hard drive is the data input and output interface or the power supply. In this case, you may want to consider purchasing a new safe, as you can see below:

If you encounter this problem, be aware that this is the slightest problem that can happen to you, as the hard drive itself is not damaged.

HDD makes a “clicking” sound

We plug our external hard drive, which was damaged after the impact, into the USB port of our computer and we see that the lights are on, so it gets power, but we see that it is not plugged into our operating system environment. There is a constant and repetitive clicking on the HDD.

In this case, do not despair, because it is possible that the components of the head are damaged, but its replacement is a very complicated task. If this happens to you, do not despair, because there is a very good chance that the HDD heads are not damaged and therefore you can recover the data you have stored.

Our recommendation? If you feel that the economic value of this data is much higher than the cost of such a repair, do not hesitate to contact a data recovery company.

Surely you have heard esoteric ideas and completely illogical ideas about recovering information from a damaged external hard drive, we have warned you from the very beginning that they serve no purpose other than to waste time and look stupid.