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Toshiba MK2004GAL HDD1422 20GB Data Recovery Information


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These are some real problems experienced by MK2004GAL HDD1422 20GB and Toshiba hard drives in general that we see in our lab. We are not affiliated in any way with hard drive manufacturers. All the information below is based solely on our experience and we do not make any claims regarding reliability of the specific model. We see mostly failed drives in our lab and therefore we don't have complete statistics.

It is a MK2004GAL HDD1422 20GB(by Toshiba). It stopped working a few years ago and I have just kept it in an anti-static bag. It doesn't make any noise at all and doesn't spin up at all. I'm hoping it is just the PCB.
Ivanka F.
Bratislava, Slovakia

Toshiba is represented on HDD market with laptop and SCSI drives. Main problem with Toshiba drives so far is bad quality of bearings lubricant in some of the 2.5 inch families(most often GAS and GAX). We see this hard drive failure since 2007 with its peak later that year.
Typical symptoms are:

  • drive spins up with loud grinding/buzzing/rattling/whirring noise: , or in worst case it appears to be dead and doesn't spin up at all
  • drive is not found in BIOS
  • when holding it next to the ear you might hear slight ticking or scratching noise as if motor tries to spin up but cannot: .
If you attempt to boot up from such drive or read any data from it you would get "Primary Master Hard Disk Fail" or "No operating system found" or "USB Device malfunctioned" error or "S.M.A.R.T. Capable But Command Failed" or some other hard drive error on boot.
My hard drive - Toshiba has a problem. I hear the drive spinning, but its not recognized in the bios anymore. I tried other power cables and other sata connections and nothing helped. It was setup with another drive using raid 0.
Elijah
Delaware, USA

All this makes the data inaccessible and laptop usually fails to boot and user get "Hard drive not found" error. 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: . This is a clear sign of a bad head and clean room combined with experience and equipment is essential here for successful data recovery.

There is one more problem that is typical for all manufactured hard drives: bad sectors. After some period of time magnetic media the platters are covered with starts to degrade and bad sectors appear.
Whenever the drive hits such unreadable bad sector 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 send it to a 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 retrieve as much data as possible from these LBAs.

At boot, windows logo appears. The bar of run passes once and the second time, the laptop reboot itself. No abnormal noise. Whene connect in an external USB adapter, the diskdrive is detected but does not seem formatted. Try spinrite. The drive is detect with two partitions. When begening the recovery, "working..." at the botom of screen and stay like that. After 3 hours, i close the laptop.
Sydney S.
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

head sticktion to the platter
Toshiba drives also share some common laptop drives problems. One of them is heads sticktion to the platter surface. Heads are normally parked on the parking ramp outside of the platters, but sometimes due to a hit or abnormal termination they fail to return to their regular parking position and are left on the surface. Immediately after the motor stops spinning they stick to the ideally smooth surface and it becomes impossible to release them without proper tools and experience. In this case hard drive appears to be dead and in order to retrieve data it needs to be opened in clean room. Don't attempt to open the drive by yourself - chances are you will damage the heads and the surface and this will make your data unrecoverable.

If you experience any of the symptoms described above with your Toshiba MK2004GAL HDD1422 20GB please feel free to contact us to get upfront quote on data recovery from your failed drive.

If you hear your Toshiba hard drive making some other unusual noises visit our Hard Drive Sounds page for more examples.

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