Corrupted hard drive

I have a quick question about a failed hard drive. I have a hard drive
that's giving me the "click of death". It's a data drive, no OS, but it
has alot of family pix on it that I never backed up (about 8gb). I'd
like to save the data, but it's also not worth it for me to spend too
much money. I found a repair service in RI that offers hard drive
repair for $100, but does not offer to do any physical repair other than
loose external connectors. The failure occurred after transferring the
drive to an HDD enclosure and hooking that up to another computer.
Worked fine until then. Really have no clue why it failed. So my
question is, has anyone ever experienced the "click of death" occurring
for any reason other than physical head failure (ie. something that
could be fixed without opening the hard drive up)?

thanx for your help
- Scott

dipdog wrote:
I have a quick question about a failed hard drive. I have a hard
drive that's giving me the "click of death". It's a data drive, no
OS, but it has alot of family pix on it that I never backed up (about
8gb). I'd like to save the data, but it's also not worth it for me
to spend too much money. I found a repair service in RI that offers
hard drive repair for $100, but does not offer to do any physical
repair other than loose external connectors. The failure occurred
after transferring the drive to an HDD enclosure and hooking that up
to another computer. Worked fine until then. Really have no clue why
it failed. So my question is, has anyone ever experienced the "click
of death" occurring for any reason other than physical head failure
(ie. something that could be fixed without opening the hard drive up)?

That sort of problem can sometimes be fixed with a
logic card swap, but not by just running some software.

It might be a dry joint that can be fixed, but it isnt that likely.

Previously dipdog wrote:

I have a quick question about a failed hard drive. I have a hard drive
that's giving me the "click of death". It's a data drive, no OS, but it
has alot of family pix on it that I never backed up (about 8gb). I'd
like to save the data, but it's also not worth it for me to spend too
much money. I found a repair service in RI that offers hard drive
repair for $100, but does not offer to do any physical repair other than
loose external connectors.

So a pure "data repair". That is not going to help you.

The failure occurred after transferring the
drive to an HDD enclosure and hooking that up to another computer.
Worked fine until then. Really have no clue why it failed. So my
question is, has anyone ever experienced the "click of death" occurring
for any reason other than physical head failure (ie. something that
could be fixed without opening the hard drive up)?

It might be a problem with the power in the enclosure. Move
it back. Maybe it will work again. You also may have
mishandled it accidentially, i.e. mechanical shock
or static electricity. In that case only mechanical repair
will help.

Arno

dipdog wrote:

I have a quick question about a failed hard drive. I have a hard drive
that's giving me the "click of death". It's a data drive, no OS, but it
has alot of family pix on it that I never backed up (about 8gb). I'd
like to save the data, but it's also not worth it for me to spend too
much money. I found a repair service in RI that offers hard drive
repair for $100, but does not offer to do any physical repair other than
loose external connectors.

The failure occurred after transferring the
drive to an HDD enclosure and hooking that up to another computer.
Worked fine until then. Really have no clue why it failed. So my
question is, has anyone ever experienced the "click of death" occurring
for any reason other than physical head failure (ie. something that
could be fixed without opening the hard drive up)?

1. What is the exact make, model, firmware, etc. of the drive?
2. What access, if any were you able to make to the drive? (For
example, if the drive was an eSATA drive, did the BIOS show the
drive, or, if USB/IEEE-1394, did the enclosure appear at all to the
operating system.)

Before proceeding further, please note if the drive is in the process
of completely failing, rather than just having had a few defective
blocks develop, ANY activity on the drive may make things


3. Have you tried back in the original system in the enclosure?
4. Have you tried putting the drive in the original system using the
original power and data connections?


You can try other solutions also.
5. Have you tried Spinrite (http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm)
Price is about $90.
Spinrite might take a day to run at the highest level of fixing,
even if only a few hard errors are found. (Typically it takes
an additional 5 to 30 minutes to fix each sector that is sick and
can't be fixed. Each segment that was sick and can be fixed
add some time to the basic running time at the highest level,
but I think this time is more like a second per segment, but
I don't remember for sure.)
6. Prosoft Engineering (www.prosofteng.com) reputedly has a
product that can be set to do limited error recovery while making
a copy of a drive. It might be possible to use this tool to
copy whatever can be copied without working hard and then use
another tool to fix the file system metadata enough to get back
most of the data. I think that this tool is "Media Tools
Professional" or "RecoverSoft Data Rescue PC".
"Media Tools" is about $400, and "Recoversoft Data Rescue PC"
$100 to $349 depending on how you want to use the product and
if you want MAC support.

Note: I'm going on hearsay he the guy that I hired
to fix my disk tried the Media Tools Professional and it
couldn't fix the problem. Spinrite fixed the problem (8 bad
sectors), at which point didn't feel like spending $400 without
having a test case to tree limited recovery on. (I didn't
have the hired guy try to fix the problem for more than a limited
time since at $65/hour I felt I was better off buying the software
than having the hired guy run the software. [I could let the
drive out of my sight/site and the repair shop wouldn't let me
rent the software overnight.])

Mark F wrote in
dipdog wrote:

I have a quick question about a failed hard drive. I have a hard drive
that's giving me the "click of death". It's a data drive, no OS, but it
has alot of family pix on it that I never backed up (about 8gb). I'd
like to save the data, but it's also not worth it for me to spend too
much money. I found a repair service in RI that offers hard drive
repair for $100, but does not offer to do any physical repair other than
loose external connectors.

The failure occurred after transferring the
drive to an HDD enclosure and hooking that up to another computer.
Worked fine until then. Really have no clue why it failed. So my
question is, has anyone ever experienced the "click of death" occurring
for any reason other than physical head failure (ie. something that
could be fixed without opening the hard drive up)?

1. What is the exact make, model, firmware, etc. of the drive?

Ooh, an expert.

2. What access, if any were you able to make to the drive? (For
example, if the drive was an eSATA drive, did the BIOS show the
drive, or, if USB/IEEE-1394, did the enclosure appear at all to the
operating system.)

Before proceeding further, please note if the drive is in the process
of completely failing, rather than just having had a few defective
blocks develop, ANY activity on the drive may make things


3. Have you tried back in the original system in the enclosure?
4. Have you tried putting the drive in the original system using the
original power and data connections?


You can try other solutions also.
5. Have you tried Spinrite (http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm)
Price is about $90.
Spinrite might take a day to run at the highest level of fixing,
even if only a few hard errors are found. (Typically it takes
an additional 5 to 30 minutes to fix each sector that is sick and
can't be fixed. Each segment that was sick and can be fixed
add some time to the basic running time at the highest level,
but I think this time is more like a second per segment, but
I don't remember for sure.)
6. Prosoft Engineering (www.prosofteng.com) reputedly has a
product that can be set to do limited error recovery while making
a copy of a drive. It might be possible to use this tool to
copy whatever can be copied without working hard and then use
another tool to fix the file system metadata enough to get back
most of the data. I think that this tool is "Media Tools
Professional" or "RecoverSoft Data Rescue PC".
"Media Tools" is about $400, and "Recoversoft Data Rescue PC"
$100 to $349 depending on how you want to use the product and
if you want MAC support.

Note: I'm going on hearsay he the guy that I hired
to fix my disk tried the Media Tools Professional and it
couldn't fix the problem. Spinrite fixed the problem (8 bad
sectors), at which point didn't feel like spending $400 without
having a test case to tree limited recovery on. (I didn't
have the hired guy try to fix the problem for more than a limited
time since at $65/hour I felt I was better off buying the software
than having the hired guy run the software. [I could let the
drive out of my sight/site and the repair shop wouldn't let me
rent the software overnight.])

| dipdog wrote:

mysterios ( Mr know all ) deserve problems

First off, TE Chea, thank you for the holiday inspiration I guess.

Mark F - the drive is a 160GB SATA Seagate slave with no OS. I have
not yet plugged the drive directly back into the board of the original
computer yet, but I have used two different methods to hook it up to two
different computers with the same result (HDD enclosure to original
computer and SATA cable to motherboard of another computer). I'm
assuming that since it continued to click and not engage on both
computers, that it will probably also click when hooked up to the
motherboard of the original computer. I didn't look at BIOS on either
computer, I only looked at Windows Explorer, but I'm assuming that since
it continued to spin and click without being recognized in Explorer,
that it probably wouldn't be recognized by BIOS either.

The whole thing actually started when my original computer started to
slow up, possibly virus or adware. I did a non-destructive Windows
reinstallation, but ******* it up (didn't leave enough room on the hard
drive for copied files). So while I was fixing that, I took the 160GB
slave drive out and hooked it up to another WinXP computer which read it
fine, and I used that to access some files. I also had a temporary
Win98 computer to work with at home in the meanwhile. So I put the
160GB into an HDD enclosure and plugged it into the Win98. The drive
spun up, but Win98 indicated that it needed the drivers which didn't
come with the enclosure (and were actually somewhat difficult to get
from MadDog). So I took it back to the WinXP computer, but now it
started clicking and didn't read it anymore. I put it back into the HDD
enclosure, hooked it up to the Win98 again, and now it clicked there
also and no longer prompted for the drivers (I'm guessing it first tries
to acknowledge it before it requests drivers). So, in between
transfers, something happened.

I guess my question is whether or not this sort of activity, continuing
to spin and click, can ever represent a correctable software problem
such as a corrupt FAT table, or if it always indicates a physical
problem such as a bad head. I'm not sure I have a full understanding of
what the clicking sound means, or if it could mean several things.

Assuming that swapping out the logic board is something that could be a
possible fix, what all is involved with that (is that simple screws and
plugs, or is there soldering involved)?

And finally, will any software be able to fix a possibly corrupt file
system, if the disk continues to spin and click (I'm wondering if you
could make any changes to the drive if the disk continues to search for
a reading point that it can't find, if that is indeed what's
happening).

thanx again
- Scott

On Dec 26, 7:34*pm, dipdog wrote:
First off, TE Chea, thank you for the holiday inspiration *I guess.



The best test to see if a software fix is viable is to look at
Computer Management Function. This is in Control Panel /
Administrative Tools / Computer Management.

Use the function, Disk management. If you are in luck, the drive will
show as a physical drive, maybe in Raw format.


The clicking is never good news, but sometimes drives will settle down
after a minute and be OK (ish). Other times, the clicking can add to
drive problems by damaging critical tracks. If the drive is seen,
then as mentioned in a post above, the first stage should be to make
an image of the disk before it gets worse.

If you can get a disk image, then you can start the recovery process.
You do not say if the drive is NTFS or FAT32. Win 98 (I am fairly
certain) will only read FAT, and not NTFS. XP will read both.

If it is FAT32, then beware of the problem that many recovery programs
do not handle FAT32 recovery very well as often the high 16 bits of
the cluster pointer is blanked. I have spent a lot of time adding
these crtical features to my own recovery program

So my suggestions

On Dec 27, 5:55*pm, " wrote:
On Dec 26, 7:34*pm, dipdog wrote:

First off, TE Chea, thank you for the holiday inspiration *I guess.

The best test to see if a software fix is viable is to look at
Computer Management Function. *This is in Control Panel /
Administrative Tools / Computer Management.

Use the function, Disk management. *If you are in luck, the drive will
show as a physical drive, maybe in Raw format.

The clicking is never good news, but sometimes drives will settle down
after a minute and be OK (ish). *Other times, the clicking can add to
drive problems by damaging critical tracks. *If the drive is seen,
then as mentioned in a *post above, the first stage should be to make
an image of the disk before it gets worse.

If you can get a disk image, then you can start the recovery process.
You do not say if the drive is NTFS or FAT32. *Win 98 (I am fairly
certain) will only read FAT, and not NTFS. *XP will read both.

If it is FAT32, then beware of the problem that many recovery programs
do not handle FAT32 recovery very well as often the high 16 bits of
the cluster pointer is blanked. *I have spent a lot of time adding
these crtical features to my own recovery program

So my suggestions

SORRY, hit the wrong key and sent the incomplete message by mistake!!


1) Get physical access to drive - if not possible, or concerned
about further damage, find a recovery company
2) Make a disk image
3) Work on logical recovery

Michael
www.cnwrecovery.com