There are many laptop manufacturers who use Hitachi laptop hard disk drives. You can find them in Dell and Sony’s to name just a couple. As you are probably aware, Hitachi purchased IBM’s hard disk drive division in 2002. I remember the date well since it was on my birthday June 4th. Hitachi kept the 2 primary hard disk lines going: Travelstar and Deskstar.
With the takeover, quality of the hard drives didn’t fall off, in fact the drives actually got better! Take for instance the Deskstar. This drive was commonly referred to as the Deathstar drive in the computer repair industry. Now it is one of the better drives. Since Hitachi maintained, if not increased, IBM’s market share of hard disk sales, DTI sees a lot of Hitachi hard drives sent in for data recovery. This isn’t a statement against Hitachi or the quality of their drives. ALL HARD DRIVES FAIL! If you are interested in the reason for the failures read my wife’s post Why Hard Drives Fail .
If you are reading this you probably need Hitachi laptop data recovery, more than likely, internal hard drive repair. Call Toll Free: 1-866-438-6932 or fill out an online quote form for a data recovery quote.
OK the sales portion of the post is over so lets start talking about specific hard drive recovery issues we run into with Hitachi laptop or notebook drives. The most common Hitachi laptop hard drive is the Travelstar.
Here is a collection of model numbers with current faults we are seeing although this is not gospel and diagnostic procedures need to be run before accurate fault prognoses can be found
Please call DTI Data Recovery Services if you have any questions about hard drive recovery.
Hitachi Travelstar’s:
Most Common Models and Data Recovery Issue:
HTS541040G9AT00 – Bad sectors
HTS548020M9AT00 – Bad sectors
HTS726060M9AT00 – Stuck Heads
HTS548040M9AT00 – Common Fine Ring around Platter
As you can see these are ranging from bad sectors to stuck heads to bad sectors caused by stuck heads to eventually causing damaged platters.
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Travelstar 4K120 |
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Hitachi Laptop Disk Models And Hard Drive Recovery Issue:
- IC25N060ATMR04-0 Common Fine Ring around Platter
- IC25N030ATMR04-0 Common Fine Ring around Platter
- IC25N040ATMR04-0 Common Fine Ring around Platter
- IC25N040ATCS05-0 Jammed Spindle Motor
- IC25N030ATCS04-0 Common Fine Ring Around Platter
- IC25N020ATCS04-0 Fine Ring around Platter – This appears to be caused by bearing problems and rotation speeds.
I believe the CSO4 models are now getting rings or minor scoring because of heads degrading over time and old age in general. Especially the 20,30 and 40gb models which have been around for years now.
Tomas, I am sending a request to our engineers for an answer to your question. It will be posted here when I receive the info on Hitachi Hard Disk Diagnostic tools.
My laptop’s drive is a IC25N030ATCS04-0. I’m looking for a hard drive utility/diagnostics tool similar to Maxtor’s Powermax for the IC25N030ATCS04-0. Does Hitachi or IBM provide such a tool? I’ve been to their sites and it wasn’t much help. I need to check if the hard drive is busted or not and I’d prefer a manufacture-specific diagnostic tool for the hard drive (i.e., Hitachi diagnostic tool for Hitachi drives; etc.)
Thanks.
Sorry for the delay in getting back to this comment. Here is the response from Malcolm our chief data recovery engineer:
It’s not a matter of running a diagnostic tool on one of these drives if the drive is clicking or your machine is starting to freeze up or behave erratically…
If the data is important I would recommend not going any further & DO NOT run the CHKDSK utility on the drive.
It is common practice to go through 3 donor parts drives to recover data from one of these drives so playing around with one of these in a volatile state is not a good idea.
Then if this is for educational purposes… the first sign of trouble is the indication of bad sectors…
Many tools including winhex or Norton’s can detect if a drive has bad sectors.
Bad sectors can be caused logically through system area corruption, or physically by sector timeouts or bad readwrite heads or Catastrophic Platter damage.
There are common faults appearing in the IC25N030ATCS04 family of drives. Many are related to fine rings around platters and the failure of one or more readwrite heads.
Hitachi also provide a downloadable application called
Drive Fitness Test
Version 4.09
The Drive Fitness Test (DFT) quickly and reliably tests SCSI, IDE and SATA drives. The DFT analyze function performs read tests without overwriting customer data. (Note: other DFT restoration utilities may overwrite data.)
Downloads
Hitachi Drive Diagnosis Tool
Hi,
I feel shattered right now because the disk that I was using as an external/movable usb isn’t working. Here is the model number IC25N040ATMR04-0
When I plug it in the USB, it gives the read light and then turns light green but doesn’t show any data at all. The taskbar shows that there is something connected but then data isn’t available
Please help
Hasan Saleem
I have the same problem as Hasan, although my model # is IC25N020ATMR04-0. it started out as my main drive and once it failed (thinking that it was simply a memory overflow) I connected it to a computer, externally, via USB and the drive would click and nothing would appear as to what the drive holds.
Please help
superd@ve
SuperDave –
It sounds like your drive has the click of death. A clicking drive usually means that the heads can no longer read the platters. They go into a seek pattern and that causes the clicking. We have to open the drive in or clean room and replace the heads to recover the files. This is expensive, around $900 depending on how many gb’s the drive is. If the drive is still recognized by the bios you might try to clone it with Speed Clone which would allow you to get the data off to another drive, but that will only work if the drive is recognized.
I lost my motherboard Cd or Data Recovery CD. For this reason I can Reinstall My Laptop. If u plz tell me how can i get that cd.
After by daughter hit the laptop in the area of the hard drive it quit working, as near as I can tell the har drive is not working ie; it say the operating system cannot be found.. Any ideas ???
Hi! I’m after some advice…
I installed a Hitachi Travelstar 160GB SATA (5400rpm) hard drive, in my HP NX7400 laptop about 18months ago.
It has been working fine on XP Pro since day one, until yesterday. I swtiched the laptop on like usual last night, and all I get is “Disk Read Error. Press Ctrl + Alt + Del to restart”.
Can you please advise me what the best way is to get back into the swing of things! I have years worth of photos and music and documents on there that I cannot afford to lose. Please help 🙁
Raveen x