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.
"Windows did not shut down properly" screen (black background/white text). Unfortunately I was not around the machine when it got into this mode. The screen showed a list of 5 or less choices - I think the default highlighted choice was to let Windows search the hard disk for errors. I chose this but it didn't seem to start after watching it for several minutes. So being the impatient sort, I rebooted the PC and the same black screen with choices displayed. This time I selected 'Start Windows Normally' but when the system came back up it ends at the same screen again. Please Help!
..Joanne Lynn, Co Durham, 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.
I own a 2yr old Dell Laptop that has recently ceased to recognize my hard drive, which is a Hitachi Travelstar. I have taken the drive out and attempted to read it in another computer, as well as through a USB reader interface, with no luck. I also took it to PC World," who advised me that the data was probably okay but the "motor inside the drive" was no longer working.
..Peter Wright, Devon, UK
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 MK4021GAS HDD2182 40GB please call us on 0207 112 1770.
If you hear your Toshiba MK4021GAS HDD2182 40GB hard drive making some other unusual noises please call us on 0207 112 1770.
