HDD clicking + not showing up.

[Illek♫]

I put a 500GB Hitachi SATA HDD (Model: HDT725050VLA360) in my PC a month or two ago. Was working fine until today. Heard a clicking sound from PC, but just ignored it until I saw that the HDD wasn't showing up in my computer.

Not much on it but would like to see if it's fixable as I don't really want to throw away 500GB if it can be fixed. The files i'm not so worried about, only 30GB on it. I'd like to get them back but can live without them.

Only things google has taught me is freezing it and if that doesn't work open it up and do some stuff >.>..

[Spekkio]

when a drive begins the click of death there is no recovery. only attempts at salvaging the data from it. check your warranty info and see if it's still covered. i'm going to guess the sound is something like this, right?
File:WD bad heads click of death.ogg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

see here for more info technically on what's happening.
Click of death - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

and for a youtube video of what it looks like on the inside as well as a great description:
YouTube - Hard Drive Click of Death Explanation and Live Demonstration

[Ikith]

I put a 500GB Hitachi SATA HDD (Model: HDT725050VLA360) in my PC a month or two ago. Was working fine until today. Heard a clicking sound from PC, but just ignored it until I saw that the HDD wasn't showing up in my computer.

Not much on it but would like to see if it's fixable as I don't really want to throw away 500GB if it can be fixed. The files i'm not so worried about, only 30GB on it. I'd like to get them back but can live without them.

Only things google has taught me is freezing it and if that doesn't work open it up and do some stuff >.>..

Try a GNU/Linux live CD. If it shows up on there something might have happened and windows may not be mounting it anymore (Had this happen personally) if this happens right click my computer hit manage then go to the drive management utility, select the drive right click and it should say something about assigning it a drive letter.

[Jefe]

It was probably damaged to begin with. But yeah, your HD crapped on you, check the warranty, I bet you can get it replaced.

[Illek♫]

Thanks for the quick replies.

Gonna try the suggestions tomorrow, tired now @_@

i'm going to guess the sound is something like this, right?
File:WD bad heads click of death.ogg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Firefox wont open thast page for whatever reason :/ Basicly it's a click every second or so at a constant speed so i'm gonna guess that's what you're thinking of.

Going to assume it's busted but thanks for the help anyway, will repost if I can get it working again.

[Ikith]

Never heard of the click of death until now. Learn something new every day.

[Kohan]

Never heard of the click of death until now. Learn something new every day.

Specifically, the clicking noise indicates a failing drive arm.

To explain this simply, envision a record player. You place a record on it, gently drop the needle, and music plays.

A HDD's drive arm is similar to this, and the round platters within are like vinyl records. If the arm is broken, the needle is never dropped, and the music (your data) never plays.

Unlike a record player, however, you cannot simply replace the arm. Those parts aren't made available, require extreme care and a clean room (which can be made out of a bathroom, but that's a tangent) to be worked with, and so on, so forth. Additionally, if the broken arm damages your HDD platters, the data written on them is most likely gone forever.

This is why there's no going back from the "click of death." Your "record player" is broken, and it took your whole collection of vinyls with it. Time to start over.

[Ragnell]

Hitachi and Maxtor Drives are complete shit, Never had a problem ever with my Samsung/WD/Seagate drives.

I had 3 Maxtor and 1 hitachi drive, all died with the click of death

[Spekkio]

Specifically, the clicking noise indicates a failing drive arm.

To explain this simply, envision a record player. You place a record on it, gently drop the needle, and music plays.

A HDD's drive arm is similar to this, and the round platters within are like vinyl records. If the arm is broken, the needle is never dropped, and the music (your data) never plays.

Unlike a record player, however, you cannot simply replace the arm. Those parts aren't made available, require extreme care and a clean room (which can be made out of a bathroom, but that's a tangent) to be worked with, and so on, so forth. Additionally, if the broken arm damages your HDD platters, the data written on them is most likely gone forever.

This is why there's no going back from the "click of death." Your "record player" is broken, and it took your whole collection of vinyls with it. Time to start over.

i'd love to hear about the bathroom cleanroom if you have a link. i'd actually been pondering making a glovebox to deal with all the drive failures i've had to deal with in my job recently. don't buy crappy components. you'll pay for it when they break and your idiot users don't have backups.

[Kohan]

i'd love to hear about the bathroom cleanroom if you have a link.

It's pretty simple, really. Run an extremely hot shower to get the bathroom nice and steamy, then turn it off, and let the steam settle. A fair amount of the potentially harmful air particles will be grounded with the moisture, but not the smallest ones. Thus, by industry standards, this will still be a dirty room, but it does take a reasonable amount of dirt out of the air.

It's of course better than nothing if the drive isn't working anyways, and you're not going to pay hundreds to thousands of dollars for someone to attempt recovery in a bona fide clean room. The glovebox option you mentioned is another good alternative.

[Correction]

Hitachi and Maxtor Drives are complete shit, Never had a problem ever with my Samsung/WD/Seagate drives.

I had 3 Maxtor and 1 hitachi drive, all died with the click of death

Don't be so quick to recommend Seagates. My 4-month old Seagate 1TB corrupted its own filesystem and I nearly lost ~700GB of data. In the end I only lost 30 or so gigs of data but Seagate does make you pay to ship their defective shit back to them for a replacement.

[Calina]

Hitachi and Maxtor Drives are complete shit, Never had a problem ever with my Samsung/WD/Seagate drives.

I had 3 Maxtor and 1 hitachi drive, all died with the click of death

hitachi isent bad i have a i think 8 or 9 year old 120gb ide hitachi drive thats worked flalessly for all that time i still use it to this day

i have it running 24/7 in an old pc i turned into a server(along with 3 other WD drives all about 5 years old each)

personaly i recomend WD have 11 WD drives rangeing from IDE to sata to laptop harddrives from 100gb to 1tb all work great to this day and all where run 24/7 at 1 point or anouther in my main pc's for 1-3 years strait

only drive ive ever had fail on me is a seagate drive that was givin to me as a gift(1.5tb drive seems they have a firmware defect or something idk)

[Galaika]

I've had Maxtor and Samsung drives fail on me before. C'est la vie, just keep a backup and get it replaced on the warranty.

[Spekkio]

all drives die. not all drives truly live.

best strategy is to not rely on a brandname to keep your drive alive, but good planning to protect for when it dies. i split my OS/software drive from my data drive so when my drive w/ my OS finally eats it from 1 too many disk pages or windows reboots after a windows update, my data's still in 1 piece. plus i mirror a lot of the critical stuff i can't afford to lose to other drives.