Hitachi DK23 failures and data recovery options

(Brief) Introduction: In the distant past, IBM manufactured the Travelstar laptop drive and Hitachi manufactured the DK23 laptop drive. With the amalgamation of the two storage manufacturing arms of these companies, IBM ceased making hard drives and Hitachi continued with IBM's models (ie. the Travelstar & Deskstar etc were now manufactured by Hitachi), whilst phasing out its own DK23 range.

The Hitachi DK23 family had a number of models such as DK23AA, DK23BA, DK23CA, DK23DA, DK23EA - all with various capacities.

DK23 failure notes and symptoms: The causes of DK23 failure are often the same as the causes of failure in laptop drives made by other manufacturers. The failure symptoms are often as follows

    * At power up, the drive will not be recognised by the computer. Also, a regular clicking or ticking noise will be heard coming from the hard disk, or
    * The drive will be recognised by the overall performance of the PC will be impacted and operation (particularly disk based operations such as file opening, copying etc) will be very slow. The machine may also hang.

Hitachi DK23DA Manufactured by Hitachi before they started making the Travelstar, these drives are now seen in fewer quanities than they once were.