Clicking, scratching, clunking, or knocking noises coming from the drive.At ASAP Data Recovery Services, we use a technique called sector slipping to avoid the bad sectors on your damaged hard drive. Bad sectors are sectors that can no longer be used to store data, and are either the result of physical damage, such as scratches on the surface of a hard drive’s platters or (for flash memory media devices) transistor failure, or logical damage, such as sectors being stuck in an irreversible magnetic or digital state (something that happens naturally over the lifetime of a media device). Modern media devices can have anywhere from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of sectors (depending on the capacity of the device).

Bad sectors – Think of a “sector” as a “location” in a media device where data can be stored.

When a hard drive’s PCB malfunctions, the hard drive will no longer spin up.

Damaged PCB – A PCB (printed circuit board) mechanically supports and electrically connects the various electronic components of a hard drive.

When read/write heads malfunction, data can no longer be “read” or “written,” which renders the hard drive useless. The read/write heads don’t touch the platters, but “fly” approximately three nanometers above their surfaces.

Malfunctioning read/write heads – Read/write heads are small, internal components of hard drives that rapidly glide along disk platters, another internal component of hard drives, to “read” or “write” data.

Hitachi hard drive diagnostics