Cannot find disk. Blue screen of death. Clicking noises, monotone alarms, or no movement at all. There are a lot of failure signs when it comes to a bad hard drive, but why does it happen? Here are a few potential hard-drive failure causes to help you figure out if there's a chance to get a quick backup or if it's time to hand it over to a professional for recovery and conversion.

Logical Failure Issues

Hard drive failure is often divided into logical and physical failure, although the differences and similarities can get a bit complex. For simplicity's sake, logical failure means some sort of data corruption that can be formatted over, rewritten, or hopefully recovered.

Logical failures are often caused by a writing error. Your hard drive data's very existence—the operating system, your personal settings, the way it works, and the data held within—is a rapid series of reading and writing data. Sometimes the wrong data can be written over or changed.

Such errors happen when a program or operation has the authority to write anywhere as needed but is instructed to write incorrectly. This can happen when power is rapidly turned on and off or when a hard reset or shutdown is performed without the proper shutdown sequence.

The most common write errors come from an incomplete write. Your data is in the process of being written but stops short of being completed and is irretrievable. Such failures are becoming less common because a series of stopping points and reminders are kept within an indexing system, but they can still happen.

Physical Failure Issues And Recovery

The physical failure section doesn't need a lot of information. If you bump, shake, or otherwise impact a hard drive with physical force, you have a chance of knocking the read/write head to somewhere strange. If you're lucky, it's in the middle of a read cycle or writing over something that is unimportant or can be recovered within your operating system. Too often, this happens while altering operating system information.

For any kind of recovery, you have the option of using the drive you have now or converting the data to another media. Newer media includes solid state drives, which lack moving parts and are less likely to fail in the middle of a cycle until their advertised life cycle limit. You can also convert the data into an online format for online storage to retrieve later.

Contact a data conversion services professional to get advice for your data conversion and recovery needs and to figure out how much effort is needed for your data retrieval.