Beeping hard drives & disk motor failure

Data Recovery from hard disk drives with motor related failures

Types of hard drive commonly affected:

• External hard drives of large capacity (320Gb, 400Gb, 500Gb, 750Gb, 1Tb) - Typically LaCie, Seagate, Western Digital, Freecom, Iomega, Toshiba
• Internal hard drives of large capacity (320Gb, 400Gb, 500Gb, 750Gb, 1Tb etc) - Typically Seagate, Maxtor, Hitachi and Western Digital
• Toshiba laptop hard disks - all capacities. Take a look at our page about common failures on Toshiba laptop hard disk drives and our Advanced Data Recovery services on all Toshiba drives

Failure Symptoms:

• Some hard drives will beep when powered on (notably Maxtor hard drives)
• Some hard drives will screech when powered on (notably Toshiba hard disks)
• Some hard drives will begin to spin but then fail
• Other drives may appear dead

Cause of Failure:

• Often related to the hard drive's fluid dynamic bearing seizing. Click here for further information

What to do:

This is a serious physical problem that has developed on the hard disk drive and it requires serious clean room attention in order to recover the data. For further information please call us.

Related problems:
If your hard drive makes a ticking or clicking noise when powered on this is a common symptom of head failure rather than motor failure. Click here to read more about hard disk drives with head faults

Please note that all modern hard disk drives are manufactured to very high standards, fail infrequently and have very similar rates of reliability.