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Hitachi drives fail and the Microdrive is no exception to this.

Hitachi DeskStar hard drive's have an alarming reputation for serious mechanical failure - the most notorious is known as the "DeskStar Click of Death". The Click-of-Death is characterized by a regular scratching noise punctuated by a click sound from the drive. Click of Death problems are among the most onerous to recover data from and we strongly recommend that you speak to one of our recovery specialists as soon as you suspect that your drive may be about to fail. The most common cause of the failure is the drive's Giant Magneto Resistive read / write heads in relation to the data stored on the hard media. This causes internal contamination which leads to the 'Click of Death' sound. If you attempt to boot up from such drive you would normally receive the error messages "Primary Master Hard Disk Fail", "No operating system found", "S.M.A.R.T. Capable But Command Failed" or some other PC or Mac boot failure message. It's critical at this point to stop reading from drive and bring it to our professional data recovery lab for a free diagnostics.. Any further attempts to read from these areas would shorten the drive's life and may result in further unrecoverable data loss.

Another issue typical for Hitachi hard drives is damage to the components on the PCB board. Hitachi 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 Hitachi hard disk will probably not even spin up.

If this is the case you can try to swap PCB from another Hitachi hard drive of the same model but the chances are close to zero for a data recovery. The donor board could "lock" itself causing a good working donor drive not to spin again. The problem is that logic board on modern hard drives are adapted to the head disk assembly it was manufactured with. In our data recovery lab we use specialised software and hardware to rebuild these adaptive parameters located in the hitachi hard drives NVRAM to make donor PCB fully compatible with failed drive.

As we have mentioned earlier the most common issue for Hitachi drives is a clicking or a knocking sound. The drive spins up and the head starts clicking from the start. Most often this a sign of bad heads on the hard drive and the drive needs a head assembly swap from a matching donor. Before doing any clean room work, it is very important to perform accurate diagnostics and eliminate a chance of possible firmware corruption that sometimes can also cause clicking on Hitachi hard drives.

Hitachi laptop or ntebook drives, share some typical 2.5 inch HDD problems. One of the main issues is heads sticking to the disk platters surface. Heads are normally parked on the parking ramp outside the platters, but sometimes after a fall or abnormal termination they fail to return to their regular parking position and are left on the surface sticking to the platter surface. It is absolutely impossible to correctly release them without proper tools and experience. Don't attempt to open the drive by yourself - you could easily scratch the media and this will make all your data unrecoverable!

If you experience any of the symptoms described above with your Hitachi Microdrive please call us on +44 (0) 2890 961976.

If you hear your Hitachi Microdrive hard drive making some other unusual noises please call us on +44 (0) 2890 961976.