I have a home built pc with an 80 gig drive. It started making a noise similar to the noise it makes when powering down and the hard drive clicks off. After a couple of days of the random click every hour or so it then started to click repetedly and the pc would freeze. I knew it was bad news then. Today it will only click and not even boot up. Any ideas on how to recover the data? Can I put the platers in another drive? I have a hp 20 gig drive and a 120 gig wd drive. The 120 gig wd drive I was using for an external hard drive which I now am using as the main drive. Another issue is I formated 15 gigs of free space on my 120 gig drive for a new os and I am unable to view the old files I had backed up. It just whats to reformat that area even though I am running the same OS as before. Any help would be great. Thanks.
Someone else mentioned this one: Bag the drive up in a Ziplock bag, to protect from moisture, then put the drive into the freezer for around 20 minutes. Take the drive back out, (beware of condensation!), and plug it up, and hope like heck it spins up so you can get your data off it.
Some have also reported that tapping on the drive with a screwdriver while booting can sometimes bring the drive back up temporarily.
Note: This particular problem, (drive clicking, but never seeming to spin up), is one I've seen before, and I've personally never had luck getting one of those to spin back up, but cross your fingers and try it, you never know.
Someone else mentioned this one: Bag the drive up in a Ziplock bag, to protect from moisture, then put the drive into the freezer for around 20 minutes.
I think that was me. I've revived dead drives for two of my clients that way in the last month, although I went for the more drastic "in the freezer overnight" approach- it worked perfectly both times.
The clicking sound is the head actuator going haywire; this can either be caused by faulty electtronics in the drive controller circuitry or by mechanical failure/seizure of the actuator. Either way, the freezing method seems to help- if it's a failing electronic component that's causing the problem, putting it in the deep freeze keeps the component from overheating long enough (hopefully) for you to pull the data off the drive. In the case of a mechanical problem, it seems that the physical contraction of the parts caused by the extreme temperature change can free up the moving parts.
Give it a shot- it beats the heck out of paying Drivesavers or some similar data recover company.
cool it is in the freezer now. Any idea on the external drive now showing anything. It didn't have a jumper when external and so I added on to make it master and there were 45 gigs free and I used 15 gigs for c and left the rest alone and now it wants to format the rest. :eek: I will try deleting the 15 gig partition and removing the jumper and see if it goes back to the way it was before if I can get booted up on the original drive. I hope that works or this will really suck.
Keep in mind that this is only a temporary solution, you'll be lucky if you get it to boot even once, so be ready to backup as quickly as possible.
We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.