HDA

Head Disk Assembly, the part of a computer's hard drive which stores the data.
Typically when a drive experiences the Click of Death (ake the OMGWTF I just lost my data) noise the head comes in contact with the disk due to the collapse of the micrometre thickess air bearing from contact with a particle, resulting in massive damage known as a head crash.

Normally the end result is a bricked hard drive, which is recoverable if you are lucky and have a couple of K$ to spend on data recovery in a clean room.

Interestingly a hard disk will instantly crash if opened up and smoke blown onto the disk while spinning, useful for demonstration purposes but ruins the drive

Sometimes a failed drive can be salvaged by the careful replacement of the head assembly from a donor drive, this is a last resort and can make things worse in most cases.

Dude, your HDA just went flatline. Hope you have backups.

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