Toshiba Data Recovery Information

Toshiba entered the HDD market with laptop and SCSI drives. The main problem with these drives so far is bad quality of lubricant used in bearing of some of the laptop families(most often GAS and GAX). This hard drive failure started to appear in the beginning of 2007 with its peak later that year. Typical symptoms are the drive either spins up with loud grinding noise, it's not gaining enough speed and not identified in BIOS(click to listen), or in worst case it appears to be dead, doesn't spin up at all and when holding it next to the ear you might hear slight ticking or scratching noise as if motor tries to spin up but cannot(click to listen). This makes the data inaccessible and computer usually fails to boot. Normally data recovery companies would attempt swapping platters is such cases in order to retrieve data. This is one of the most difficult and therefore most expensive jobs in data recovery, but in our lab we have our own know-how technology that allows to deal with this problem without opening the drive and helps us keep prices much lower.

Another quite common symptom Toshiba drives have is clicking, knocking or sweeping sound. The drive spins up and the head starts clicking right away with a constant or intermittent sound(click to listen). This is a clear sign of a bad head and clean room combined with experinece and equipment is essential here for successful data recovery.

There is one more problem that is typical for Toshiba hard drives: bad sectors. After some period of time magnetic surface starts to degrade and magnetic domains can't be turned in a desired direction by writing element of the head. This is how bad sectors appear.
When the drive starts reading data from such unreadable bad sector it could start freezing, scratching and sometimes even clicking. This leads to further damage to the surface, heads and causes more data loss. As soon as you start experiencing such symptoms while reading important files stop the drive immediately and send it to our data recovery lab. Any further attempts would just add up to the problems. In our lab we use special imaging hardware tools that are capable of reading raw sector data ignoring checksum check. That's usually the only way to recovery as much data as possible from such sectors.

Below is the list of models manufactured by Toshiba. Click on yours to see if there are any special remarks about it. If you can't find your model in the list there is still a great chance we can handle it. Just fill out evaluation form or contact us.