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Samsung SpinPoint PL40 Data Recovery Details
Samsung Hard Drives fail and the SpinPoint PL40 is no exception to this.
   
About 4 years ago I bought a new hard drive new at a computer show. Two weeks later I dropped it to a hardened concrete floor. Now it rattles inside. Now after a long time I am want to recover the files I backed up onto it. It sort of sounds like a little piece of plastic bouncing around inside when I shake it.
..Jim Saunders, Manchester, UK
Samsung hard drives are well-known for their factory firmware problems. Factory Firmware is stored on the disk platters in the so-called System (Service) Area of the hard disk. If one of the disk modules becomes corrupted the whole hard disk micro-operating system can't boot up, the drive cannot initialise correctly and thus stops working. If you attempt to boot up from such a Samsung hard drive or read any data from it you would get "Disk boot failure. Insert system disk and press enter" or "Primary Master Hard Disk Fail" or "No operating system found" or "USB Device malfunctioned" error or "S.M.A.R.T. Capable But Command Failed" or some other BIOS error.
Currently there is no way to fix this type of firmware corruption at home. It is quite a complicated procedure and requires use of specialised expensive equipment and deep knowledge of hard drive design and data recovery technology.
I have a Toshiba laptop. Windows NT 4.0 is installed on it. The hard drive is configured as NTFS partition(s). The laptop will not boot from the hard drive anymore. I get: "non-system disk error -- ... " ..Dermot French, Lancashire, UK
Another issue for Samsung hard drives is damage to components on the PCB board. Samsung 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 micro chips on the PCB burn out you would smell smoke in the air. On next boot your Samsung hard disk will probably not even spin up at all!
The Samsung 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.
Samsung, p/n: SpinPoint PL40 The hard drive clicks 5 times then switches off. There is very important data on the drive as its our storage server.
..Tom Harris, Lancashire, UK
The last regular Samsung 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. 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 Samsung 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 Samsung 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 Samsung SpinPoint PL40 please call us on +44 (0) 2890 961976. If you hear your Samsung SpinPoint PL40 hard drive making some other unusual noises please call us on +44 (0) 2890 961976.
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