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.
A power failure two nights ago took it off line. I noticed the next morning as I scanned my Windows Explorer that it was not listed along with my other 2 disks. The blue light was flashing, which has happed in same circumstances before. Following the Lacie recommendations, I took it off line (turned the blue button off, unplugged the drive and removed the USB cord). I then reinstalled the drive power cord 1st followed by USB cord to Disk then to CPU. I did not plug the USB cord into the same port of the computer as it was prreviously plugged into. Since then the blue light is still flashing and I have no access to all my Photography including my main portfolio. Any help would be greatly be appreciated. It's a Toshiba, p/n: MK6025GAS HDD2189 60GB.
..M Davies, 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 MK6025GAS HDD2189 60GB please call us on 0207 112 1770.
If you hear your Toshiba MK6025GAS HDD2189 60GB hard drive making some other unusual noises please call us on 0207 112 1770.