Problem with Dead Clicking Hard Drive.

[zitstinka]

Hey all, I've been reading [H] for a long time, but never took time to subscribe to the forum. I have a quick question to ask: Is there anything to do as a last resort with a dead Hard Drive? The bastard died on me this morning with all the nice pics I had of my family. The only thing I can hear comming from it is a wierd clicking noise.

I do not have a backup of my data, shame on me :(

Thanks all.

[gadnium]

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=755668

Your in the wrong sub-forum, bud.

[H]ard|Forum > [H]ard|Ware > Disk Storage Systems is where all disk threads are.

I can see how you mixed that up though.

[zitstinka]

Thanks for mentionning it. Thanks for the pointer to the post about "clicking" HDD, I read about the freezer trick and I'll be trying it tonight. I did a bit of additional research and searched google for "Freeze your Hard Drive". I ended up on on a page (http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/01/freeze-your-hard-drive-to-recover-data.html) were people were actually suggesting that we put the HD in an USB enclosure before putting it in the freezer, and after this, just attach the enclosure to the computer via a long USB cable and run it from inside the freezer. I had quite a laugh reading some of the stuff over there, I'm not sure if all the suggestion are very good, but I'll be trying it out anyways.

[gadnium]

hehe, running it from the freezer...

I had two different drives (WD and Maxtor) in my Xbox that started clicking. But they still booted and allowed me to pull the data off before they completely died.

Another maxtor 80gb drive in my pc did what yours did, completely crapped out and would just click. I can't think of the model off hand but it was known for getting its firmware corrupted somehow. It would be detected but would throw up some wierd model name.

A way to fix this was to track down a similiar drive and pray to god it had the same firmware revision. Swap the chips then it would work again. But finding the same chip with my firmware was almost impossible. I still have that drive under my bed just incase data recovery becomes affordable. It had some quality pr0n on it.