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I forked out a bit of money some time ago and bought myself a SATA Quickport Quattro but now it wont function the way it should. When I bought it the idea was a simple one; I could put any four SATA drives into the machine at once without the hassle of having to open up a drive or bay each time I wanted to do so. This worked well for the first few months but lately when I try this I seem to be getting a series of errors that I can’t decipher. It would appear the Quattro in the way it did at the beginning isn’t recognizing some of the drives. Attaching drives which used to be plug and play is now a case of jamming the drive in and hoping it reaches and touches the connectors inside. It has caused me problems with several discs and I now have at least two that I cannot access by normal means. I’ve searched the internet but I’m being told the problem isn’t with the Quattro it’s with the drives. I doubt this because I struggle to believe that several drives manufactured by several different companies could all end up with the same fault at the same time. Anyway, to cut a long story short I have disc drives with important info on them and I can’t access them via the Quattro or even by installing them in separate machines. Is there anything you can do to help?

It’s been four or so years since I bought a Networked Assist Storage device and all has been working well. Only recently however it’s come to my attention that one of the drives in my setup isn’t working and that in all the time I have been using the NAS the drive has been prone to problems. The reason it would appear I didn’t notice there was a problem was because I was running my NAS in the RAID 5 setup and that meant that the other drives continued to work and pick up the slack leaving me to think the thing was just running slower than the norm. That’s not the case though and although three of the drives still work one has given up the ghost and it is the one I really need access to. There are about 9000+ images of a one in a lifetime holiday my wife and I took to America last year and if I cannot get access to the drive I fear I will lose them. I tried taking the drive out of the NAS and putting it into an ordinary desktop computer but it would not work as either master or slave and I’m frightened to try and install (or try to install) an operating system to the drive in case I lose the data altogether or make the problem much worse.

Hard Disk Repair

Hard disks are the lifeblood of any computer be it a laptop, desktop machine or server churning its way through thousands of information requests on a daily basis.

Next to the CPU and the memory the hard disk is the one piece of hardware within your computer that should be kept under close attention for the first signs of anything problematic.

There are numerous things that can go wrong with a hard disk drive and more often than not many people – be they individuals or even IT professionals – simply decide that the hard disk is beyond repair and replace it, throwing the old one away and losing out on valuable information and data which then takes them considerable time to collate.

Common hard disk problems are those that may involve the user trying a quick fix on their own with information gleaned from message boards and forums on the Internet. It is important to note that although in the smallest of instances these so-called quick fixes have worked for some, for the most part they do not work and seek only to cause more irreversible damage to the hard disk drive.

So-called Head Crash is a problem that arises when the heads of the drive come lose and come into direct contact with the platters of the drive. The platters are the areas of the drive where your information is stored and once the head and platters make contact the first and most important thing to do is to reduce this amount of contact by switching your computer off. Restarting the computer will do nothing other than make the problem worse as the drive spins up from zero speed to the speed at which the head and platters meet again.

Problems with the PCB (Printed Circuit Board) on your hard drive are also common and likely to render your hard drive useless. The drive’s firmware (the built in software that tells it what to do in conjunction with your computer) is contained on this PCB and damage to it means that your PCB won’t work and therefore your hard drive won’t either.

Sticking spindles also cause hard drive problems. Spindles operate underneath the platters of the hard drive and if they become unstable and lose they can damage the platters that in turn will render the hard drive almost certainly useless. You will know if you have an issue with sticking spindles because of the grating sound that accompanies them as they come lose.

Now as we have said these problems will render the hard drives useless it does not mean they cannot be repaired. With professional assistance in a professional environment these problems can be rectified or at the very least the data retrieved. You should be aware however that if you attempt any of the quick fixes demonstrated on the Internet then you do so at your own risk and at a greater risk of losing all your data on a permanent basis.

If you have a hard drive problem then you have a better chance of successfully recovering your data – or even having the disk repaired – if you contact www.easyrecovery.co.uk