• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Head Crash I think

M

mavro6000

n00b
Joined
Jan 27, 2007
Messages
27
Hey guys, I need your help. I have a Western Digital Hard Drive 500 KS. Well, I turned on my computer this morning and it started to make a "click" noise. I believe its a mechanical failure such as a head crash? I been getting quotes from $1000-$2000? Is this reasonable?

What are some of the cause on this "crash"? Its a brand new hard drive. I just bought it about 2 months ago. Could it be over heating? My computer is always on and I have 2 SLI GTX 260 evga cards?

Is there anything I can do just to recover my music, saved profile for games, email?

My motherboard will not even recognize the hard drive.
 
Does it not function at all?

Try get data back, if the drive does not function at all, then you might have a problem recovering your data.

As for the recovery quotes, those sound acurate. It's very expensive to recover data on a dead drive.


Drives fail, its what they do. Next time make good backup, even if your data is on another drive or even tossed on a dvd or something.
 
Clicking noises is generally the heads resetting because it failed to find what it expected. There could be a lot of causes for this. Try running a HDD diagnostic tool on this HDD. I recommend those on ultimate boot CD.

Believe me, a HDD head crash is hard to miss... the scraping, metal-on-metal (or metal-on-glass) sound is the stuff of nightmares, ensuring you that you'll never, ever get your data back.
 
Well, I dont think I am able to run that HDD Diagnostic because the motherboard wont even recognize the hard drive. That the problem, because when I run the software, the software says that no hard drive is found. I am SOL?
 
mavro6000 said:
Well, I dont think I am able to run that HDD Diagnostic because the motherboard wont even recognize the hard drive. That the problem, because when I run the software, the software says that no hard drive is found. I am SOL?
Click to expand...

Then you are pretty much SOL.
 
Clicking and a failure to detect the drive is usually a controller failure. Sometimes you can swap the controller (exposed circuit board on the bottom) with another one, but it typically must be an identical drive, sometimes even down the the firmware. If that's not an option either the data is lost, or you can pay big bucks to have someone recover it.
 
Even if there are physical problems with the heads or platters, the drive should still be in the bios. If you cannot see the drive in the bios, then NO recover software will be able to do anything on your system.

Your system did not experience a head crash. The controller card failed. Your data may be available on the platters, it's just that the electronics for the controller are dead.

$1000 - $2000 is not unreasonable for data recovery.

I save all of my data on a RAID 5 NAS, and back the important stuff up to 2 separate usb drives. How important is your data to you.

Don
 
Where can one get the ultimate boot cd?? I have a drive doing the click but it still showing up in the bios.
 
Have you tried running speedfan's SMART app on your hard drive. It might give you some ideas on what is failing.
 
Well, thats the thing, I cant do nothing. I am unable to even access the drive. When you mentioned the cirucuit board, what did you mean by that?
 
The circuit board is the PCB thing on the bottom of the drive.
 
Have you tried the freezer trick. It's worked for me. Will get you 5-20 minutes of drive access if it works. Usually you can do it a few times.
 
Does not work. I let the hard drive in the freeze for about 24 hours and boot up the hard drive and bios did not recognize the hard drive and it still makes a clicking noise.
 
"It's dead, Jim..."

The clicking noise is normal, that's the servos trying to align the heads and the motor trying to spin up the platters; if the bearings are hosed it won't go anywhere so you'll just hear clicking. That's the worst of the situation and totally irreparable without dis-assembly of the drive which isn't something you should do anyway, so it's toast.

The fact that the BIOS isn't seeing the drive is almost insult to injury in many respects, but alas, there's basically nothing you can do with that drive at this point and whatever data you had on it is effectively lost forever unless you pony up for a pro data recovery service which would be pretty damned expensive. They'd have to disassemble the drive and remove the platters, mount them in the same exact model/brand drive and try for a data recovery at that point, all done in a clean room environment.

Good luck, regardless...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top