- The drive been formatted or re-partitioned and re-loaded.
- Virus infections.
- Power failures due to lightning and power surges/sags.
- Mechanical failure. Accidental or unintentional deletion of directories or files.
- The drive corrupted and not being able to read the data files or directories.
Symptoms of damaged or malfunctioning hard drives may be the drive not being detected by the BIOS of the computer or laptop and an unusual clicking/grinding sound from the hard drive amongst others. In some instances the hard drive may be detected by the BIOS but still report as unreadable by the operating system.
