HD Clicking...

[13tuba]

Hey all,

I have two hard drives with some issues:

"HD1" was used for a significant period of time (about 2 years) and then stopped being recognized by the system and made a fairly loud clicking noise once the platers spun up. I'm thinking that something went wrong with the read/write arm and that the magnet has probably suffered heat induced failure.

"HD2" is a bit more promising, owned for about 2 months with light usage, it was accidentally knocked off a computer case about 2 ft to a padded carpet (in a padded soft plastic case). It is recognized by the computer (xp gives a bleep recognizing a usb device) and shows in the hardware manager and all - but fails to have a drive letter assigned or show up in my computer.
Model: WD500KS-00MNB0 Type: WD Caviar SE16


I'm curious if there is any hope for either of these drives, I've pretty much given up HD1 for dead as its pronounced click of death. But HD2 still operates normally, is recognized more or less by the computer just fails some software check?
Model: WD1000H1B-00


If you have experience working with bad drives, links, suggestions etc please let me know, references to other post are also greatly appreciated!.
Thank you much for your time!

 

[wahnula]

HD1 is probably toast as you suggest. Once the clicking starts you better act fast, copy the files off it and maybe run chkdsk X:/r where "X" is the letter of the drive.

HD2 sounds like an external USB drive. To eliminate the possibility of case damage, I would remove it from the external case and install it as a slave drive (if IDE) or as a second drive (SATA does not care about master/slave). Once installed, I would first see if the BIOS recognizes it in BIOS setup. If so, continue into Windows and try to format it in Disk Management: Start-->Run-->diskmgmt.msc

Once in Disk Management create a partition (or two) and format. Best of luck!

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[goombawaho]

If you ever hear a hard drive clicking and you have important data on it, it's best to turn it off immediately. Our data recovery company (Gillware) walked us through the mechanics of hard drive failure and recovery. They said that physical damage to the platters may be occurring when you hear the clicking so it's best to turn it off and seek professional recovery IF the data on there is important enough.

 

[CapitalData]

HD1 goes to the museum.
HD2 is not "yet". In general, WD drives are very fragile and more vulnerable then some other brands. Yes, they are very high performing hard drives; however once the head crash occurs – they’re the biggest pain to fix (if fixable).

If you knocked it off, just replace it, as data recovery may cost you way more than a brand new hard drive. The biggest problem with WD drives is that it's really hard to find good matching donors for them, and even if you do, they may not match.

I don't mean to advertise anything here, but you may find this little gallery interesting:

http://www.capitaldatarecovery.com/gallery.html

Cheers

Best Regards,
Karen
Capita Data Recovery Inc.

http://www.capitaldatarecovery.com

 

[goombawaho]

I can't imagine this statement to be true with reference to Western Digitial: "The biggest problem with WD drives is that it's really hard to find good matching donors for them, and even if you do, they may not match."

It seems like there would be more WD hard drives out in the field than most other brands so that finder a donor shouldn't be as much of an issue as with other smaller brands.

And in my experience, just in terms of number of drives I've seen that have been dead, Maxtor is the number one. I see REALLY old computers with working WD drives and 3 year old machines with dead Maxtors. Just one man's experience working on PCs for the last 10 years.

 

[CapitalData]

Well, I am not here to argue with anyone. I guess we are here to share our experience and help people, so this is what I did. We get through a number of hard drives daily and I must say that data recovery companies don't really like WD drives only because it's difficult to find good matching parts for them. If you look at the gallery, you will see identical WD drives that have 2 and 3 platters, 3 and 4 heads, and those were supposed to be 100% identical.

Yes, WD are good drives when they work. However, once fail, some of them are really difficult to fix.

Maxtors were failing a lot, but it was possible to fix them, as parts would most likely be compatible and they were easy to find. WD - story is different.

Within last 2-3 years we've been using Seagate drives in most of the labs; however due to the recent volume of failed seagate drives we switched back to WD...and frequent backups.

Best Regards,
Karen
Capita Data Recovery Inc.

http://www.capitaldatarecovery.com