Non-Physical Damage To The Hard Drive
If you cannot get to your data or the computer does not boot to the operating system, you face a logical problem.
Logical damage to a file system occurs more often than physical damage. Logical damage is mainly caused by power outages that make file system structures from being incompletely written to the storage medium. Hardware and drivers problems and system crashes can result in logical damage too.
This causes the inconsistent state of the file system including: infinitely recursing directories, drives reporting negative amounts of free space, system crashes, or an actual loss of data.
Main reasons for logical damage include:
- Corrupted Partition Tables
- Corrupted File Allocation Tables (FAT)
- Deleted Files
- Virus Attacks
- Corrupted Master File Tables (MFT)
- Formatted Drives
There are different programs to correct these inconsistencies, and practically all operating systems come with repair tools for their native file systems. Linux has the fsck utility, Mac OS X has Disk Utility and Microsoft Windows provides chkdsk.
Sometimes some logical damages can be mistakenly thought to be physical damages. If a hard drive’s read or write head begins to click and make irregular noise, users can connect it with physical damage.