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.
Im running windows XP Home Edition on a Time Computer laptop which is about 10 months old and has an AMD Athlon 1800 processor and 384 Ram.. It was working great untill a couple of months ago when the screen froze and forced me into shutting it down manually. After rebooting I got the message "Hard Disk Boot Sector Invalid".
..T Jones, London, 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.
My external hard drive that had Toshiba(model MK1652GSX HDD2H03 160GB) is connecting via an external hard drive casing. After I connect it to one of my PC's, it does not show up in "My Computer". I checked its properties under Device Manager, there it said this device is working properly. Can you receover the data from this type of fault?
..Toby Price, Portsmouth, 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 MK1652GSX HDD2H03 160GB please call us on +44 (0) 2890 961976.
If you hear your Toshiba MK1652GSX HDD2H03 160GB hard drive making some other unusual noises please call us on +44 (0) 2890 961976.
