Hard drive clicking, won't show up in drive list. Any chance at reading data?

[bungiefan]

Seagate Barracuda model is ST31500541AS. It disappeared suddenly from my drive list. It sounds like it spins up fine, but then I start hearing clicks for about 30 seconds and then it spins down. The drive I had it duplicated to failed last month and I hadn't gotten a replacement yet. Any options short of sending to expensive data recovery? If a part is replacable for me to get one read off the drive I can probably handle it opening it once to salvage what I need. It was my personal document storage that I kept off my OS drive. I've heard about freezing the drive, plugging it into an enclosure, and reading it, but I'm holding off until I have a new drive to dump anything to. Drive shows up at boot with a SMART error, but no details before Windows starts booting.

It contains my music library and all my program installers, as well as my personal documents folder. Assistance with pulling any data from the drive would be appreciated. Will make an audio recording of the drive when I can.

[orinthia]

There's a small handful of things you can try, which are mostly the sorts of things a recovery service will try to do:

First, you'll need to find another drive that is exactly like the one that failed. The closer it is to the original build date the better. From here you can try removing the pcbs from the drives and transplant the known working one to the dead one. This may help as some drive failures are due to failures of some of the chips on the pcb.

You could also attempt drive arm or platter transplants. Not for the faint of heart, but with some practice on other drives, it's very possible to do it yourself. You just need a few special handtools to safely twist and move the drive heads and platters. The clean room doesn't have to be as clean as you think it might; just needs most of the dust in the air removed. Look on youtube of folks doing this (if you dare).


Other than that, there's no amount of software that will "revive" a drive that won't stay spinning. There are other things though, like excessive heat or cold can sometimes make it work, but you may end up damaging the drive further. I only mention the heat since it actually let me view a drive of mine in raw byte form for a while: the drive originally failed while being super hot, and after it cooled down was when it no longer stayed spun up (drive did what you described). Thing was 500gb, and most of it was inconsequential, so I never pursued any real recovery path. Just added the drive to a growing pile of old ones I never touch anymore (like a dozen old ones from the 90s and another handful from the early 2000s). I'm such a goddamn techno-packrat

[Melena]

If you want to take a chance, put the drive in an airtight container and pop it in your freezer. Make sure it's sealed tight so condensation doesn't get in. Old supervisor managed to revive a drive that way long enough to get some data off, but he exhausted all other options first. Use it as a last resort. You can also try a external USB enclosure and see if that gets it read. Again, no guarantees though.

[bungiefan]

I have an external eSATA enclosure to try. I'm not too afraid to take it apart, but the matching drive I bought at the same time died a few years ago, and I don't think I have it since moving. PCB transfers are easy enough. Internal parts transfer is a bit more of a pain because of what tools I may have on hand. The freezing method was my original plan once I obtain a destination drive for any data I might be able to read.

[chiyio]

I've had the freeze plan work on a drive before, I've read if you put some instant rice in with it they will help soak up the moisture and keep it dry. Before anything I'd just try it in an external enclosure and try powering it up and down a bunch of times seeing if it will randomly come up.

[NynJa]

Seagate

If you get that data off, you may want to not replace your Seagate with another Seagate

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-...eptember-2014/

[D44kpunk]

there are quite a few tools you can attempt to rebuild the drive with if you know what you're doing(understand partitions MBR etc), if you don't try the freezer thing or take it to someone that does computer forensics

[bungiefan]

If you get that data off, you may want to not replace your Seagate with another Seagate

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-...eptember-2014/

I'm trying to get funds together to buy a batch of drives for a RAID5 or RAID6 with WD Red NAS drives, so that my desktop doesn't remain as a file server on my network, and so that I have a place to backup my drives. The problem is my tower has reached 12-15 TB of drive space at points, and buying enough to back it all up is a pain. I've bought one or two drives at a time to put in my tower to add free space as I could afford it, and keeping duplicate drives available hasn't always been in the budget.

A fried donated a tower to me, minus hard drives, and with a bad CPU fan. I've been planning to turn it into a FreeNAS or OpenNAS when I have drives to put in it.