I had an old hard drive start clicking on me the other day at work. After some cursing, I accepted the fact that I was going to lose whatever data I didn’t have backed up elsewhere and set the drive on top of my trash can. Fortunately, one of our IT employees happened to walk by. He suggested putting the drive in the freezer for an hour or two, then let it thaw out and try to boot it again. I laughed at him but he insisted. I decided to give it a shot.
Sure enough, the drive booted up and I was able to pull all of my data to a backup before the clicking started up again. Apparently, by causing the components in the drive to expand and contract, you can sometimes temporarily fix platter issues. Give it a try the next time you have a “dead” drive. What’s the worst that can happen?
Ah the click.
did a lot of reading about that and saw that suggestion too – left it as the absolute final option.
Sure enough it actually did work (but as i pulled the data off i was careful not to turn it off otherwise it might not have a chance again).
But two things:
1. Make sure its in an airtight ziplock bag or something so, if your harddrive has an exposed underside (even if it doesnt), it won’t get any damaging moisture in it
2. Might also be a good idea to find a file-recovery software on standby as soon as its ready to be ripped. My drive refused to allow me to copy data off it the normal way (itd come up with a CRC check failure), and lots of stuff was missing from the file listing in explorer, so i had to get a program that would take the data off as it is, regardless of any errors (which i can sort through later and trash damaged files, anyway). I think i had ‘Zero assumption recovery’ and ‘getbackdata FAT/NTFS’. i think the first one was more slightly more useful.
Anyway
clicking hdd usually means the drive is going to die, so, make sure you’re prepared.