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.
First, screen freezes and the system didn't react on mouse or keyboard. Needed 5 boots to get over login, but couldn't start taskmgr: system only shows wait cursor. Mouse worked, could make ping on IP, but nothing else. Finally, i switched it off.
Now, i can't boot. Got error that d:\winnt\system32\config\system was invalid or missing. By using cd boot and repair console i found out that 'system' and 'system.old' exist, saved the file and replaced system by system.old, but no success.
..Richard Meek, Middlesbrough, 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 have a Dell Inspiron 5150 which just stop working. The computer just turned off, and I can not get it to come back on. I setup the system so the hard disk drive has a password set. How do I clear the hard drive password so I can copy the data from hard drive?
I have tried installing the drive in an Inspiron 700m and it prompts me for a password, but says the password is invalid. How do I clear the hard drive password so I can copy the data from hard drive?
..Z Glass, London, 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 MK3254GSY HDD2E41 320GB please call us on +44 (0) 2890 961976.
If you hear your Toshiba MK3254GSY HDD2E41 320GB hard drive making some other unusual noises please call us on +44 (0) 2890 961976.
