A distinctive Toshiba failure is a distinctive whining sound which can be heard just before the drive stops working. It is also common to hear the sound of the motor attempt to spin up, fail, and then retry repeatedly. Toshiba drives can also suffer surface damage caused by the heads being exposed to excessive heat, the heads will begin to adhere to the disk's surface leading to scratches and the manifestation of bad-blocks.
I have an old computer acting as a fileserver with several drives. The drive that died is a Toshiba(MK2018GAP HDD2164 20GB). I simply could not access the hard disk today. I logged into my Mac and found the disk had failed. It seems mechanically dead with no spinning noise at all. I tested it on another Mac system with no success.
..P Baker, Middlesbrough, UK
Another issue typical for Toshiba hard drives is damage to the components on the PCB board. Toshiba Hard Drives are vunerable to overheating and power surges which can lead to a burned out motor or blowing a controller chip on the logic board. If the chips on the PCB burn out you would smell smoke in the air. On next boot your Toshiba hard disk will probably not even spin up. To recover from this type of problem we need to modify a new PCB board with rom information from original drive.The Toshiba drive can spin up and the head starts clicking right from the beginning with a regular clicking sound
. More times than not this a sign of bad heads, if this is the case it is very important to perform accurate diagnostics and eliminate a chance of possible firmware corruption or PCB failure that sometimes could also cause clicking.
The last typical Toshiba hard drive issue applies also to all other hard drive makes and models, the problem is called bad sectors. After some period of time the platters were the data is located starts to degrade and bad sectors appear.
Dead Hard Drive. I put in a spare power supply and it booted up (no monitor or keyboard, just heard it power on). I got the new power supply today, but when the computer boots up it does not detect the hard drive. I put the hard drive in another computer and it is not detected. When the machine powers on I can feel that the drive is not spinning up.
...G Millar Luton
Whenever the hard drive attempts to read bad sectors it could start freezing, scratching, ticking and sometimes loud clicking. This leads to further damage to the surface and causes more data loss. As soon as you start experiencing such symptoms while reading important files, stop the drive immediately and consider sending it to a data recovery company like ourselves for a free diagnostic. Any further attempts to read the Toshiba drive would just add up to the problems and make more data unrecoverable. In our Data Recovery Lab we use expensive imaging tools that are capable of force reading bad sectors from Toshiba Hard Disks. This is usually the only way to effectively retrieve data from these Drives.
If you experience any of the symptoms described above with your Toshiba MK2018GAP HDD2164 20GB please call us on 0207 112 1770.
If you hear your Toshiba MK2018GAP HDD2164 20GB hard drive making some other unusual noises please call us on 0207 112 1770.
