The Tech Zone has posted a Data Recovery Guide on How Hard Drives Fail
Hard drives are extremely fragile and can suffer failures in many different ways, leading to a loss of data. The five most common types of drive failures are: logical errors, mechanical failure, electronic failure, firmware corruption, and bad sectors, or any combination these. Least severe of these is usually data loss due to logical errors..
You can check out this guide over here.
Data Recovery Guide - How Hard Drives Fail
Posted on Wednesday, February 15 2006 @ 7:31 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck