External Hard Drive Click of Death

F'ing epic fail.

Don't understand? I'm an emotional wreck.

Thank you

Bite the bullet! Admit that you are a lazy, no good, non backer-upper and take it to the man.

It will cost you, but the odds of your fixing it by using the (always thoughtful and intelligent) combined knowledge and opinions of this group is nil.

Shame on you for using something that is over 100 years old in computer years!

Good Luck.

I can't help myself. Have you ever been to a backup anonyms class? It's hard-core.

Thank you

Well, at least you have admitted that you have a problem.

After 10 years of hard drive abuse, you can get some help now.

If you have to, call me, I'll walk you through the first few scheduled backups.

Once you start doing it regularly you will see that it's very satisfying.

I learned long ago that I can't go it alone.

Good luck!

While it is true that there is a low likelihood of saving that data, there is a short list of things that might work (short of taking it to someone who will remove and read the [hopefully unscratched] disks).

Here's what I do first:

-Fully unplugged, change orientation of drive and while holding in new orientation try to connect (upside-down, both sides, on end, on butt) Do Not Move Drive While Powered!

-Freeze drive (in a moisture-proof container!), thaw drive (while leaving in container to avoid condensation), repeat changing of orientation tests.

-Open external enclosure (in static-free environment), determine model # of drive, search for same drive on ebay, purchase, then swap the electronics (1 board) between them and see if that works.

Best of luck, been there, done that.

Recent client dropped her laptop, her entire young career as an artist (installations only, no existing work) was documented on that drive. All gone. The above attempts did not work for her but have worked for many.

Under No Circumstances Should You Open The Hard Drive Core Yourself! You need a clean-room, a host of specific equipment, and knowledge of that drive.

RR

1. Tried didn't work.

2. I like your freeze drive idea. I'll try it.

3. I will look into

Thank you

If the boot sectors are corrupt then it might be possible to mount the drive as an extra drive in a Linux system and copy the files. A "extra data drive" in a Linux system might not care if the Windows boot sectors are bad (or maybe it will, don't know answer but it is a good idea to consider).

There are at least 3 or 4 Linux "Live CDs" out there that have system recovery tools on them. Most of them are a bit beyond me so they are probably well above the average "Window's only" user that hasn't used Linux. But, people use them for good (system recovery) and bad (hacking past passwords) all the time. Google a little and see what you find. If you know anyone that is good at Linux hacking then it might be a good time to look up that old phone number and give him/her a call.

If the hard drive electronics are trashed then probably your only options are a data recovery service or finding a working drive of the exact same make and model and hope you can do a "non clean room" swap of the platters and make it work. Given a choice I'd put my money on a lottery ticket, but if all else fails and you consider it trash then it might be a fun adventure to try.

Just to cover all the bases, are you sure it is the hard drive? The cable or the controller electronics (probably on your motherboard) could also have gone bad. The drive has the moving parts and is probably the most failure prone item, but that doesn't mean that it has to be bad.

Thanks for reminding me to start doing backups of my system.

Bruce

P.S. CheeseMagnet and I were composing responses at the same time and I didn't see his until after I posted. Replacing electronics is still risky, but it is a MUCH BETTER idea to start with rather than changing platters. If ALL ELSE (cables, motherboard electronics, CheeseMagnet's ideas, etc.) has failed then why not try changing the platters with another drive of the same make and model. Anyone who knows what they are doing will tell you that it won't work, but years ago I knew someone who was successful with a manual platter change. But be warned, if by chance you do it AS A MEASURE OF LAST (I MEAN LAST) RESORT then get your data off FAST. There is a good reason everyone will tell you that it won't work and it won't be long until they are right.

Tried different cables and computer. Didn't help.

Thank you,

If your drive didn't give you time to save your data, my condolences.

My laptop HD started doing the click-of-death and I knew what was coming. It gave me just enough time to copy all my data off to an external HD before it failed completely. The OS and all my programs needed to be reloaded from scratch on a new drive. Only took about 8 hours to get back up and running (the "fresh" Windows install actually ran better!).

I now use a drive "cloning" utility to make duplicate copies of my desktop and laptop HD's every 2 - 4 months. It requires an extra HD and about an hour per computer, but the clone drive can be installed and running in MINUTES if I have another failure.

HD's are now so inexpensive it is easy to justify having an extra 1 (or 2) around as a backup for critical data.

Could you share the name of the drive cloning software and how easy it was to learn to use.

Also, have you ever used the clone to see if something like an XP "hardware change detection" would cause problems with the clone?

My laptop is a few years old running XP. I purchased an external drive for backups about 1 year (lucky me) prior to original drives failure. The hardware I got was bundled with software from

http://www.apricorn.com/product_detail.php?type=reg&id=1023

Best method for me is to boot from the CD, which provides a simple partition/format/clone utility. The cloning process appears to be completely transparent to XP. I have cloned and tested (swapped original for clone) several times over the last couple years. XP hasn't had any problems with the process.

I suggest you perform an up-to-date search for similar utilities which may be cheaper or perform better.

Thank you,

Bruce

You could take it to one of those drive-recovery companies. However, they charge thousands of dollars to retrieve what data is left.

I was rushed to get out of the house this morning to get to a compy job, so I missed a few points.

-Before I would buy another matching hard drive for electronics swap I would use an IDE to USB adapter (w/ separate power adapter for drive) and see if the drive is good but it was in fact the enclosure's electronics that were to blame. (can also install drive as slave in existing desktop, but I'm mostly lappy-based). I have never spent more than $15 for an IDE to USB adapter. Be sure to center the IDE connector the cheapies don't key in right, have to eye-ball it. Will help if needed.

-It is true that a platter swap can be done without a clean room, but after having scrapped around a hundred drives, I don't think it is universally easy to coordinate removing the hub and the reader arm on all models, plus there are many other concerns while inside there. If the fate of the human race depends on it... oh, wait, it doesn't.

RR

I would STRONGLY suggest that if Cheesemagnet's suggestions do not work (I'd probably skip the electronics changeout just on general principles though) someone like Ontrack is your absolute last hope. DO NOT under ANY circumstances open the platter chamber or your decade worth of data will be toast. It might be anyway, but you are farther ahead if you let the experts play with the HD guts instead of trying to do it yourself.

but as others have said, be prepared to PAY. There is nothing like an expensive error to drive home the lesson, so this could be looked at as a good thing, after a fashion.

Hi dkriley,

I have had a little success in recovering data from a laptop drive (at the first sign of clicking) and a customer's desktop drive (no clicking but wouldn't boot) using a USB to IDE cable and running the hard drive as an external device. At least you don't waste the last gasps of movement with it trying to boot and you may have a chance.

The cables are fairly available and now I think you can get them with the small laptop and the desktop IDE and Sata drive connectors. Good luck!

Rorschach is right, the only reason I don't consider an electronics swap to be severe is because I have been at this for the last 10-or-more years. If that data is truly valuable, heroic measures should be carried out by professional heroes. I try to save my customers' money, but knowing the limits of my expertise is critical. Depending on your level of comfort with these things, you may choose to pass it along and feel the relief of knowing you gave your data it's best chance of survival. Remember to Learn the lesson though, I have a customer who is teetering on the edge with his agency's data on a many-year-old laptop with no backup. If I could have that poor art student bawling her eyes out in front of him I am still not sure it would get his a$$ to get with the picture, but I can only pull so many rabbits out of hats before the end comes. Everyone needs to know: With hard drives... The End comes.

Gee you need to back up every day!!!

http://www.myharddrivedied.com/

Go watch the videos. When you have exhausted the steps that are within your abilities send money or take your lumps.

I just had the same problem and went and found a working unit of the same model and size and swapped the boards. Was able then to boot the drive remove my data and it now is a nice addition to the trash. Saved the working board and put it back on to the old drive for the next poor guy. There is a company in Canada that has boards for you to buy that are not expensive if you can't find one in someones junk. Sorry my is for a 160G drive.

Hi I have a solution for you:

http://rapidshare.com/files/214445906/hgkapd.rar

Peter Riches
Office: +33-170-619-862
E-mail: Pete.Riches@cpd-certification.eu

Sounds fishy as can be.

Hmmm... if a hard drive had the hardware inside to repair physical damage, why wouldn't someone have offered the "In-Destructo-Drive" by now?

Three .exe's and a .nfo file, all encrypted with a password...

The fish pudding gets thicker & thicker...

Agreed, this smells like snake oil. RUN do not walk away from these guys. Knowing your luck it is spyware at best, and a nasty destructive worm at worst. After all, if all of your data is destroyed, would anyone blame the program when they already know the drive is toast? They are preying on your desperation to sell you crap and take advantage of you.

If the drive is still spinning, there is a good chance machine you can read most of the data from a Linux machine without booting it- I have had good results with this, not only for failing drives, but for drives lost to viruses as well. If the drive is no longer spinning, and the data is really that valuable with not chance of recovering it from other sources, then the best option is to send it to one of those outfits that wants thousands of dollars to recover it...But I wonder. When was the last time you called up a ten year old data file? Is it really worth thousands of dollars?

This is a typical failure - go to http://www.datacent.com

I just had them recover a disk like that with 20years of customers data for a client of mine.

They give you an estimate and price and do not charge if they cannot recover.

They have a clean room and lab to do this type of work.

By-the-way they do not charge "thousands of dollars" hundreds maybe.

They were able to "clone" the drive, give a replacement that was twice as big at no extra charge, and it booted when installed in the system!

hi you dont say how long it runs for but if you want try and back it up useing tera copy, then go to grc.com and use spinrite it might save your drive for a while longer its a brillant programe, and i use it to test my drives every few months.

hope this is of some help.

Like most people, I have been there and done that. If you can get your data recovered by the experts, good for you. After that break down and run a RAID system (2 mirrored drives). I run two 1 terabyte drives. If one fails the other one is identical. Drives are cheap.

now that you have been thoroughly referred to data recovery experts, let me tell you my tale of woe. Unlike most people, I DID know better and actually made a valiant attempt to do the right thing, but I still had my head handed to me, it can happen to the best of us.

This tale happened back in the mid 80's back when drives were still either MFM or RLL and a huge drive of the day was 40 meg. A common trick of the day was to take an MFM drive and reformat it as an RLL drive. RLL, being somewhat more efficient encoding technique, ended up giving you around 1.5X the drive space formatted than MFM did. so you could buy an expensive 40 meg MFM drive, reformat it with an RLL controller (they were physically different), and end up with a 60 meg drive setup which was a really really sweet hack. On top of that there was a relatively new program called Stacker which was essentially a compressed drive program that zipped all the data up into a giant zip drive and then mounted it in DOS as if it was a separate logical drive. It generally doubled to tripled the drive space available, so you could end up with 120 meg of space or more by combining the two. WAY COOL Hack.

My wife worked at a law firm who refused to archive any electronic documents onto removable media and they instead wanted every file ever created to reside on my wife's computer's HD. They did however install a Colorado Memory Systems 250Meg DC2120 tape drive that she dutifully backed up to every evening. the drive was chock-a-block full and the drive had already been RLL'd so that hack was not available. They hired me to install Stacker onto the drive and move all the data onto it.

I told her to run a full backup to a new tape before I arrived (it was my birthday and I was expected at home for a birthday party) so that i could go right to installing Stacker. she did, i got there and started to install Stacker and the installation fell over. the drive was too full and there wasn't enough space to compress the data. so i decided that since there was already a fresh full backup, I would simply nuke the drive, reformat it, install the OS, install stacker, and reinstall the CMS tape drive program, and then read all the data back off the tape onto the newly formed compressed logical drive. Sounds like a plan right? well... not so much.

Seems the new tape she used was one of those "preformatted" tapes that aren't so much formatted as just bulk copied from an existing formatted tape. there is no error checking involved to mark bad sectors on the 'preformatted' tape. This tape had a bad sector in the worst possible place for such a bad sector, in the data directory sector! To add insult to injury when she did her backup, she had not checked, didn't know to check, (and the program did not check by default!) the "verify after backup" option. So she dutifully ran her backup onto a bad tape and the program didn't give her the least indication that there was a problem. Then I blindly come along and nuke what was the only viable copy of the data. I was so-freaking-hosed. Ontrack saved my bacon. They were able to reconstruct the data directory from the actual data on the tape and recreate the backup. it wasn't cheap, but every scrap of data was saved and I avoided a real problem with my wife's boss.

lessons to be learned:

pre-formatted disks/tapes are dangerous. they will screw you every time. format your own, you'll thank me. (this is not as big of a deal these days, but it used to be.)

when you back-up data turn on every verification option available to you, because you'll end up discovering your problem at the worst possible time to discover your data was not backed up the way you thought it was.

when you discover your data is in limbo, turn the job over to the experts, you'll be glad you did in the long run.

Oh the pain of experience!

RR

(ouch! with a happy ending)

My first professional IT work was with the Sirius/Victor 9000, a machine way ahead of the IBM PC at the time. They used 1.2MB 5.25" floppies (don't you know young feller...) when the Neanderthals at IBM were still on 180K single sided. They managed this by using variable-speed floppy drives, the same technique used by CDs; rotational speed was decreased as the head moved further from the centre, allowing more data to be stored in the outer tracks.

Trouble was, the IBM cave dwellers were right - keeping the system low-tech made for greater reliability. The Sirius needed really high quality discs, and frequent head cleaning. Even so, the floppies were not to be trusted.

One customer bought a machine and we emphasised that the floppies should be copied at least once a week, and preferably daily. We were assured they would be copied daily.

The system worked well for nearly 12 months. Then one day we got the call; system down, data irretrievable, safety of the universe in the balance. Have you made copies of your discs I ask? Absolutely, every day.

Headed to their office. The floppy drive was lunched and had scratched all the floppies. I replaced the drive and asked for the copies of their discs. I was presented with an immaculate lever-arched file, dutifully filled with hundreds of photocopies of the floppy discs, all filed in date order.

The secretary was really pretty, though. It took me 3 days and nights to get all the data off the scratched floppies.

I have an 80g Ipod that just clicks. New battery, tried the reset button push technique. My question for it and a hard drive is: like an old windup clock, will twisting the case back and forth in the plane of the disk get it going? One poster said not to abuse the drive while it was energised......

Mien Gott in Himmel man! Are you freaking daft? That is a LOCK to destroy whatever data may be on the drive.

Thanks, didn't know. Works for motors, will get them going for just a little while, like enough time to retrieve data before the final seize.

How about the Ipod, is there any secret reset, like taking out the battery and then pushing the buttons to discharge caps? I'm always looking for ways to fix things, it's a hobby. One site said to slam the damn thing down hard to refresh the ribbon wire contacts, seemed dumb.

I had a Mini [4g], after dropping it off a 20' ladder, no music

I tried to restore & all the usual methods

On the apple forum it was suggested to wack it on a table on the right side.

It worked for me, the hard drive finally gave up about a year later...

I think it made the arm on the HD reset

I'm waiting until I come across cheap compact flash

You might try poking around the Apple forum.

Hard drives can be saved. Mine was. I had to send it to a place down in Florida who dismantled it in a clean room where they took the disk itself and re-installed it in a good drive, put the files on some CDs/DVDs and sent the individual CDs/DVDs to me.

Cost was about $600.00 but I would have paid twice that as I too had years of information on that hard drive. Suggest you do a Google Search using something like "Hard Drive Crash" and see what you can find out.

Ken

Hi,

I am interested in what you mentioned that you are getting the ticking sound from your external hard drive. Pls make sure whether it becomes hot after you plug in to a USB port. If yes, the problem may not be in your main hard disk. It is possible to be spoilt in your adapter card which is attached to your hard drive casing. Whenever the adapter card spoils, it has given the ticking sound. pls go to a computer store and try your hard disk with a new casing attached with an adapter card. Suppose it could help you.

Wish for you good luck.

Rgds,

Kotuu2.

$150 for recovery + the cost of a new hd. In my case the capacitors in my Asus with 'all the bells and whistles" mobo dried out and shorted out everything except the video card.

Have since switched to heavy duty solid state mobo.

First and foremost, thank you all for excellent ideas: support (morally and mentally).

I have not yet resolved weather my clone is DOA or not. I my working on each of your ideas and will keep you posted in the outcome.

Resistance is futile.