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21 December 2023  Jennifer Thatcher  Technology Manager of Test Dept.
 

Summary
Learn about common symptoms and causes of hard disk failure. Find reliable hdd repair software and data recovery methods to restore your lost data.



Table of contents

table iconI. Symptoms of hard disk failure and causes of hard disk errors
table iconII. How to fix hard disk errors?
table iconIII. How to use Renee Undeleter to recover data in hard disk
hdd repair software

I. Symptoms of hard disk failure and causes of hard disk errors

Symptoms of hard drive failure generally manifest as:
● The mechanical hard disk does not respond or makes abnormal noises. Please refer to the detection and repair method of abnormal hard disk noise.
● The hard disk prompts that it needs to be formatted or cannot be accessed.
● The system prompts that the file or directory is damaged.
● Data on the hard disk is lost.
● The computer does not recognize the hard drive, or the file system becomes RAW. Please check the detection and repair method of RAW hard disk.
● The hard disk partition suddenly disappears and becomes unallocated.
Symptoms of hard disk failure
Kind tips You connect the hard disk to your computer, Windows may prompt you with the message “The disc in the drive needs to be formatted before using it. Do you want to format it?” In this case, please click “Cancel” and do not select “Format Disk”. Formatting a hard drive without a data recovery tool can lead to permanent data loss. If you accidentally select “Format Disk”, you can try using a third-party data recovery method to recover your lost data.

You need to format the disk in drive

There are many reasons for the above failure, the following may be:
● virus attack
● There are bad sectors in the hard disk
● Sudden system shutdown or crash
● human error
● Power and overheating issues
After understanding the symptoms and causes of hard disk errors, the following will introduce the repair methods of hard disk errors, let’s find out together.

II. How to fix hard disk errors?

Before starting the repair, you should manually check the power supply and fans to make sure they are working properly. Then try the following hard drive repair solutions.

1. Run antivirus software

At times, hard drive errors can be caused by viruses and malware. Thus, using antivirus software to scan and remove these malicious programs can potentially fix corrupted hard drives and restore accessibility. It is advisable to connect the affected hard drive to a different Windows PC that has reliable antivirus software installed for a thorough scan and removal of viruses.

2. Use hard disk detection/repair software to repair hard disk errors

If the hard disk has bad sectors, you can use special hard disk detection/repair software to detect and repair hard disk errors.
Step 1: To begin, download and install the hard drive bad sector detection tool on your computer. We recommend using HDD-SCAN, a free software that can diagnose hard drive issues and also works with RAID array servers, flash USB, and SSD drives. This program can detect errors such as bad blocks and sectors, as well as display SMART attributes and modify HDD parameters like AAM and APM.
Official website link: https://hddscan.com/
HDD-SCAN
Step 2: HDD-SCAN can output the scanning status to the interface in a graphical way. When the disk detects about 78%, there are a lot of bad sectors B.
scanning situation
Step 3: HDD-Scan has the ability to generate comprehensive scan logs with detailed results. If any bad sectors are detected, it is highly recommended to utilize the repair software offered by the hard disk manufacturer, such as SeaTools or Western Digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostic. You can easily find the appropriate hard disk repair software online based on the brand of your hard disk.
Note: If the repair software provided by the brand is used to repair, all data may be erased. If you don’t want to lose data, please back up your data first.
SeaToolsTools

3. Use Windows built-in tools to check and repair hard disk errors

You can try using Windows built-in tools to check and fix hard drive errors. If the repair is successful, you will be able to access the data again. In Windows 10, 8 or 7 do the following:
Step 1: Please press the Windows icon + R key, please enter (diskmgmt.msc) in the pop-up input box, and then click (OK) to enter Disk Management.
run disk management
Step 2: In Disk Management, right-click on the failed hard disk partition and select (Properties) on the menu.
check disk's properties
Step 3: In the (Tools) column, select (Check).
check SD card
Step 4: If your system is Windows 7 or Windows 8, please check (Automatically repair file system errors) and (Scan and try to recover bad sectors), Windows 10 automatically repairs all errors by default.
The primary purpose of scanning for hard disk errors is to designate any areas with bad sectors as unusable at the file system level. This helps prevent the storage of file data in these unstable spaces. Even if you use HDD-Scan for scanning, the bad sectors will still be visible. To fully resolve the issue, your options are limited to low-level formatting (which may not be fixable) or replacing the hard disk.

4. When the partition becomes unallocated, rebuild the partition for reuse

Upon becoming unallocated, a hard disk partition will no longer be visible in the file explorer and all data within will be lost. To utilize this space, it is necessary to reconstruct the partition. The following steps outline how to do so:
Please follow these steps to recover an unallocated hard disk partition in File Explorer:

1. Right-click the (Start) menu and select (Disk Management).

2. Locate the unallocated partition and right-click on it.

3. Choose (New Simple Volume) from the options.

4. Follow the wizard’s instructions to set the capacity, drive letter, and file system for the partition.

5. Once completed, the partition will be recovered and visible in File Explorer.

Please check: Features and differences of FAT32, exFAT and NTFS file systems
create simple volume for SD card
After rebuilding the partition, if you need to recover the lost hard disk partition data, you can check the following content to operate.

III. How to use Renee Undeleter to recover data in hard disk

1. What is Renee Undeleter?

Renee Undeleter is a software specially used to restore system data files. When you accidentally delete important files, empty the recycle bin, or format the disk/storage, you can use this tool to retrieve the lost data. The software covers four functional modules, including file recovery, format recovery, partition recovery and image creation, which can help you solve all data loss problems in an all-round way.
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Easy to use Recover data by 3 steps;

Multiple scan modes Fast partition scan, whole partition scan and whole disk scan;

Supported file types Image, video, audio, text, email and so on;

Image creation Create a partition image to read and back up data;

Supported devices SD card, SDHC, SDXC, USB flash drive, hard disk and computer.

Easy to use Recover data by 3 steps;

Multiple scan modes Fast partition/whole partition/whole disk scan;

Supported devices SD card/USB/hard disk.

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2. How to use Renee Undeleter to recover hard disk data?

The specific operation steps are as follows:
Step 1: Download, install and run Renee Undeleter on the computer, and select the (Whole Disk Scan) option on the main interface.
Note: Do not install on the disk that needs to restore data, so as not to cause data overwriting.
select whole partition scan in Renee Undeleter
Data recovery function introduction:
Fast Partition Scan  - Quickly retrieve files lost due to accidental deletion or emptying the recycle bin.
Whole Partition Scan – Quickly recover files lost due to inaccessible or formatted partitions.
Whole Disk Scan – Analyze and get partition information and perform a full scan of the entire partition.
Image Creation – You can create a mirror image for a partition to back up the current partition state.
Step 2: Next select the hard drive that needs to recover data. After the selection is complete, click (Next).
select a disk to recover in renee undeleter
Step 3: Please wait patiently for the scan, this process will find out all the partitions that have existed on the hard disk, and then the “Select the partition you need to scan” window will pop up, you can select the partition that needs to recover data to scan. If not selected, all partitions will be scanned and it will take longer.
Step 4: During the scanning process, you can double-click to preview the file. If all the required files have been found, you can check the target file, and then click the (Recover) button to restore the data in the hard disk to other disks of the computer.
recover files from whole disk scan with renee undeleter