On many occasions, it should be possible to repair broken hard drives through a series of hardware and software checks. This article shows you some of the different analysis techniques you can use for doing your own PC maintenance on a damaged hard disk.

Begin by manually inspecting some of the internal components. In particular, check the cables are in good condition, that connector pins are undamaged and that there is no sign of heat damage to the external cables. Visually inspect the internal hard drive for any signs of electronic burnout damage. This type of hdd repair is however best left to trained professionals to complete. You can however still try clearing out as much dust as possible from inside the PC as this can lead to overheating of the drive.

Next, open the BIOS menu when Windows is booting up to check your hard drive has been detected. It may simply be that broken hard drives have conflicted with other hardware components. To resolve this, remove the external components to test that the drive itself can still be picked up by the BIOS.

Your hard drive could actually have bad sectors which have affected operating system and application programs. This can occur due to physical damage to the platters or even software problems with the disk management utilities. Run Windows Error Checking utility to rectify the fault. This can also be run from the emergency boot disks if necessary.

Finally, if all attempts at fixing your broken hard drives have failed then you could resort to doing a data recovery. This type of HDD repair involves extracting the hard drive if necessary and housing it within an external drive casing in order to get it connected to a second PC. You can then use data recovery tools installed on the secondary computer to scan for your lost files.