Recover Data from Clicking Hard Drives

After finding your hard drive is making an unusual clicking noise, you should stop using it immediately, except for necessary operations to achieve data recovery. Avoid any changes that could bring secondary damage to your valuable data on clicking drives and start recovery immediately by following the tutorials.

Under normal working conditions, hard disk drives make clicking sound every now and then. The read/write head of a hard disk drive is mounted on the actuator arm and moves back and forth to access files across sectors of the platter. Different models of HDD make different clicking sounds and if your HDD has been making clicking sounds and appears to be functioning correctly then these clicking sound may be the natural working sound of your drive.

There are 2 cases where the clicking sound should be taken seriously:

1. Frequent loud clicking sounds. 

Although your hard drive is still visible in Windows or Mac, it shows symptoms of response lag and random freezes.

In this case, you should transfer data from the clicking hard drive immediately while you still can access the data. The clicking sound problem will only get worse with time and eventually lead to sudden unexpected failure. That is why this problem is called "click of death". 

"Click of death" is the sign that the HDD is failing as the malfunctioning read/write head is unable to access data correctly and will move back to its original position to try again. This process rapidly repeats thereby making the clicking noise.

2. Your hard drive can't be accessed anymore. 

There could be a number of reasons for this to happen

• Read/Write Heads Problems
• Preamplificator is dead
• SA corrupted or scratched
• Firmware issue on the PCB

When the clicking hard drive cannot be detected by the computer, you should first check if it still shows up in Disk Management.

Follow this tutorial to finish failed hard drive recovery with H Data Recovery: 

Step 1: Free download H Data Recovery 

Step 2: Launch this software and choose "Hard Drive Partitions Lost or Crashed" from the main window. 

Step 3: select the target drive to scan by clicking on "Next" button. 

Step 4: View the list of the Scanned files and pick out the ones you need to recover. Then, press "Next" button and choose a safe storage path for them. You should alway store the recovered files on another drive or partition when recovering files to avoid data overwriting.

Bottom Lines

In conclusion, when you begin to hear sudden loud clicking noises, you could try to copy data off hard drive quickly to rescue important files. But when you hear a lasting clicking noise accompanied by scratching and screeching sound, you'd better stop using that hard drive and turn to H Data Recovery to do a complete file recovery.

The worst case scenario is that the clicking problem gets so bad that it damages the platter (the physical storage medium) and the drive will not be recognized by computer system.Then you should make a decision between rescuing the hard drive by turning to professional data recovery teams (with an amount of fee) or give up the hard drive and all the data within it.This requires you to balance between the value of the data and the amount of fee you are willing to pay.

In no case should you open the drive case and change parts on your own.The problem is we can hardly find a proper environment (clean rooms) and tools to finish this operation. Therefore, irreversible damage will be generated, making both data recovery and further use of hard disk impossible.