Hard drive Click O Death

[Van]

I have a WD 1600JB WD Caviar SE drive that I put into an Eagle Consus external IDE/Sata enclosure and starting lastnight it started giving the CLICK O DEATH so I shut it off. I thought it might have been hot so I let it sit overnight as this enclosure doesnt have a built in fan but is all aluminum and vented but no luck. The drive will click several times in the same pattern and does spin up but the computer wont see the drive so its not completing the handshake between the drives board and the computer. Any suggestions aside from a door stop?

 

[TheForce]

I have seven drives here with the ol' click click click and I've tried board swap and power supply swap. These are all internal IDE ATA flavor. I'd like a suggestion too. Even if the drives have no data appearing, I will use file scavenger and reconstruct. Just need the electrical to get working. Fortunately the data is very old and unlikely I will ever need it but I hate having an incomplete archive of my client projects.

 

[navychop]

I've heard of people claiming the old freeze-thaw worked for them, but I have my doubts. I once had to pay a data recovery firm to save the data on my dead HDD. VERY expensive, IIRC.

 

[TheForce]

navychop-

Don't do that again. If the drive works, you can reconstruct most drives data using software called file scavenger. I use it here and have saved many drives. The trick is when the drive is discovered bad, do nothing to try to scramble or delete any sectors. It's a slow process but I set up a spare computer and let it go to work for a couple days sometimes. If the drive doesn't fireup, then you may be SOL.

 

[navychop]

Years ago. Head damage. But thanks.

 

[Van]

It would be nice to save the drive but it looks like nobody knows.

 

[primestar31]

It would be nice to save the drive but it looks like nobody knows.

Try it in various positions, such as on it's side, laying flat, upside down laying flat, etc. IF you can get it working at least once, suck everything off it FAST!


P.S. YES, sometimes the freezing thing works for this problem! I freeze them with a can of freeze spray, hook them up, then use CasperXP to clone it to another drive. I had a drive that was not accessible, and had the "ball bearing ping of death", and Casper eventually was able to make an error free clone at 20+ hours of trying over and over.

 

[Foxbat]

Sometimes you can recover data IF you have another drive of the same kind to donate the controller board to the effort. Another possibility is to take off the controller board and clean any motor connection pads. However, the modern drives don't make much use of these pads as the proved less reliable than actual plug/jack type connections.

Primestar31's recommendation of varying the drive orientation has worked for me in the past, too.

Regarding a data recovery service, the one time I made use of Disk Savers, they did a stellar job of recovering the data off of my Sister-in-Law's notebook drive. Unfortunately, it would have been cheaper to have flown back to San Antonio and re-visited all the places we went than it was recovering the pictures and personal data off of the dead drive!

 

[Van]

The clicking is the arms jumping from the resting position out to the platters and back again in three successive patterns each time. I've laid it in various positions to no avail. The drive was not dropped so Im at a loss for this. I know what its doing because I had a laptop drive that did the same thing so I cracked the top off and watched it do it while it was powered up.