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My laptop's hard-drive completely died last week. It started with a boot-up failure, so I started up a live USB to inspect the drive. This didn't really work as it seemed to freeze the system up, but I did get an error about a fault in one of the sectors/partition that held the OS.

Because of the freeze ups, I restarted into the live USB to try and repair the drive, but it was no longer picked-up and BIOS doesn't see it any more. I putted it in another laptop and its BIOS doesn't see it either.

So now I'm trying to recover some data since the current back-up is two months old (forgot to set it up after distribution upgrade) and came across this question.

I know that a 'propeller' broke on the fan and caused a bit of vibration when it was on and suspect that it might have caused the damage. So I want to know what kind of damage can such vibration cause so that I can consider the recovery options?

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chesedo
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Hard drives can be very resilient to lots of different things, but vibration can damage them. Your hard drive will have mechanical movement as heads move very quickly (7200 RPM) at very close proximity to the platters, which store your data. Vibration can cause the heads to connect with the platters at times they aren't supposed to, kind if like the needle of a record player touching a record where it isn't supposed to.

In addition to the above issue, vibrations can cause the heads to become unstable making data reading very difficult, but from your description you seem to have the former problem (if vibration is the cause).

In terms of recovery you could put the drive in a caddy and run TestDisk to see if anything can be done, but if your drive is physically damaged I think this might be a hard lesson in the use of good backups.

Matthew Williams
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  • Also if you hear strange noise coming from HDD, it's time to backup and prepare for HDD crash. – Jet Jun 20 '14 at 09:07
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    @Jet | If the sun rises it's time to backup ;) – Matthew Williams Jun 20 '14 at 09:10
  • Thanks for the answer :) Do you think the caddy might get past the issue of BIOS not detecting it? – chesedo Jun 20 '14 at 10:02
  • @Pieter | You would use a caddy to access it as a USB device on another computer. It might load, but I wouldn't put to much hope on it. Only making a suggestion at this stage with some prayer thrown in there on your behalf. – Matthew Williams Jun 20 '14 at 10:05