Can you recover a clicking hard drive

These tips can exclude all the connection issues that may exist. If the clicking noise remains, continue to try other fixes detailed below.

If you can't access the saved data, revert to Method 1 for help. When a hard drive is overheating, you may hear a clicking sound coming out of the computer. Freezing your hard drive can, on one hand, cool down your device, and on the other hand, shrink the components inside to free up the stuck or trapped ones.

Once the hard drive works again, back up your data or recover data from the hard drive immediately. Step 4.

If the hard drive is too old, purchase a new drive and replace the old one. If the clicking sound persists, I'm afraid there are significant hardware issues, such as a broken head reader, damaged components on your hard drive.

In this case, you may need help from hard drive repair specialists to fix the clicking hard drive and recover data from it. Send the defective hard drive for a replacement if it's still under warranty.

Take the clicking hard drive to a local hard disk repair center. The specialists can replace the control board if there is an electrical failure or replace the disk head if it is weak or damaged. On this page, we explained why is your hard drive clicking, guided you to recover data, and fix a clicking hard drive with 5 reliable fixes. Fixing a clicking hard drive or external hard drive is possible.

Follow tips on this page to make your malfunctioning hard drive work again. If you still have questions about this issue, check out the questions and answers below for help. If your hard drive is failing or dying, making a clicking noise, there are some fixes for you to try:. He mainly writes articles about data recovery tutorials on PC and Mac and how-to tips for partition management. He always keeps an eye on new releases and likes various electronic products.

Roxanne is one of the main contributors to EaseUS and has created multiple posts on digital devices like PCs, Mobile phones, tablets, Mac, etc.

She loves to share ideas with people of the same interest. I want to try use software before putting it in the freezer. The same thing is happening to me with my external 3tb Seagate harddrive.

I have tried every piece of software available for download to try to get my files but nothing will work…. Can anyone tell me what they think might be causing this since there is no clicking or beeping, no noise at all??

I can hear it spinning in side…. Did you ever figure out what was happening Claudia? My Seagate 3T External Drive is doing the same exact thing.

I did try freezing it and it worked for awhile. Any suggestions anyone. Maybe this article will help. After a power outage computer would not start. You are a miracle worker. Shows up as F drive.

Everyone I told about this idea told me that it was the most ridiculous thing they had ever heard-especially all of my tech loving friends. I tried it because I had nothing to lose, and to my shock and happiness I was able to access my drive and pull about 35 gig of data before it failed again.

All of my friends were amazed. Thanks for the advice. Also, apparently reading more about my drive this failure for no apparent reason is nothing new. Thanks for the comments. I especially like the My Books that contain dual hard drives for mirroring. That way, if one fails, your data is still safe on the other.

When I plugged them in again last week, 2 of them would spin up, click 3 times, spin down and then repeat that cycle. No luck! WD — bah! I needed to recover over GB of data from my disk. I used the freezing trick and it worked first time but I only manged to get 10GB of data.

I therefore returned the drive to teh freezer to refreeze it. This worked. I have repeated the process over 10 times now and have continued to get data from the drive.

Finally — in my experience adding a bag of frozen pees to the top of the drive make sure it remains in the sealed bag seems to lengthen the usage of the drive…. Happy Days. My laptop has Xp on it for an operating system. When you plug the drive into the USB port It starts to see the drive then it pops up a message that there is a problem with the device.

I have been using a known good external HDD case brand new in fact The reason I know the case works is because I have another drive that does work in it. Its 6 degrees outside Ya gotta Love New York weather so I put the Drive in a ziplock bag and opened up my grill and set it on the bun warmer shelf.

I have or so songs on this drive.. I hope this works. I will post my results. I am going to leave it out there over night to see if that works. My daughters Mac Book, still under warranty, seems to have died, with the whirring noises described in the above postings. All that we want to recover are her photos. Her docs are all archived. Also I wonder if removing her hard drive and reinstalling it will void the warranty diminishing her chances to either get the computer fixed or replaced.

Thanks for any advice. Give Apple a call if you want to be certain. If you do want to give it a shot, iFixit. Hope this helps! I have a macbook sitting in front of me with the exact same problem. You run the risk of condensation forming on the electronics when you take it out, and likely other than the Hard drive failing the rest of the laptop is fine.

It has saved the data from my hard drive. I had a LaCie GB external drive which had a mechanical failure and thought I had lost all my files. I put in in the freezer for 24hrs wrapped in 2 Ziploc freezer bags, fired it up and recovered the data.

Thanks again — good luck with yours. Going to get the ziplocks tomorrow. My computer finds the disk Im using a swedish version of XP so i dont know all the terms in english in disk management, but it doesnt show up as a drive when double clicking My Computer. What do I do? I just bought a hard drive enclosure and saran wrapped it closed after adding the clicking hard drive in it. I then froze it for 2 hours left it is the freezer and punched a hole where the power goes and the usb plug goes.

Thanks everyone for helping me out. I have connected a laptop to my harddrive in an external enclosure while it is in the freezer. It looks pretty funny with a usb cable running out of my freezer but it gives me unlimited time to backup important files, kinda like Aaron…. I just took my failing WD myBook and, with firewire and power still attached, wrapped it in saran wrap, then paper towels, then saran wrap again and put it in the freezer of my mini-fridge.

Hopefully I can be another cinderella story like some of the earlier posts…. Did you have any luck with putting your MyBook with power still connected in the freezer and then pulling the data off? I think Paul was talking about putting the actual hard drive not the whole computer in the freezer while the hard drive was attached using a firewire cable. I would not recommend putting the whole laptop in the freezer as this could cause serious problems to the LCD screen, battery, and other components.

Sorry about that, I misread your comment. Maybe Paul will be able to give us some insight. Worked like a charm! I took my myBook the external hard drive with the power and firewire cables plugged in to the hard drive but not the outlet or computer and wrapped it very very very heavily in plastic wrap and paper towel. My base layer was paper towel and then I alternated heavy layers of plastic wrap with a layer of paper towel.

The goal here was that the paper towel would absorb any moisture that tried to sneak in. I was also very careful to seal the wires with electrical tape so that no moisture could sneak though. Then I left things in my freezer over night. The next morning, I just plugged things in. I had about 30 minutes of usage. Then back to normal. I was able to get into a routine of a few hours in the freezer to about 30 minutes of usage until I got almost all of my gb of files back.

I was even able to unwrap the old HD after I was done to send it back to western digital for my refund. Hard drive making noise, getting to windows progress bar on vista but bar keeps going across and not getting any further.

This same thing would happen to the external itself if I try to access any folder on it. The hard drive makes no odd sounds and spins as usual. One thing I know I did before it stopped working was leaving it sitting on top of my laptop over night. I am not sure if the heat could have messed it up or not but I have done this many times before.

I would really need to know if anybody has had this same issue and I would need to know if the freezing trick could help or need to know if it could hurt anything. I was completely skeptical. I thought this was a joke. I had visions of trying this and looking like a fool. I can NOT believe this worked. This saved my ass… literally. Thank you to the guy who figured this out… you are my hero. I got a seagate gb sata drive in February and the other day my pc just stopped working.

Removing the case seems like a bad option as it totally void the warranty, so i have no chance for exchanging it after that… so, is it ok if i do as mentioned but only thing is to place my entire harddisk with its casing in the freezer? You should be able to just leave it in the casing as long as the hard drive itself can still get cold. Hope it works! Sorry to hear that. Although they can be pricey, they usually have a pretty good success rate in cases like this.

So I have a Macbook, with a hard drive failure. Called Apple support and after they scolded me about not backing up my data the guy mentioned that he himself has placed his hard drive in the freezer and been able to retrieve data. When I asked him how, he clarified that he could not recommend this as a solution, and that removing my hard drive would likely void my warranty. But he again repeated, that he has known that this freezing thing works. He suggested 3rd party software — Disk Warrior, which I bought and did not work.

I think he was trying to throw me a lifeline with the freezer tip, without losing his job. Is it more or less or just a likely to work or not with a Mac versus a Pc based hard drive? Macs and PCs both use the same type of hard drive, they are just formatted differently.

So this technique will work just as well with a Mac formatted hard drive as it does with a PC formatted hard drive. But I was wondering: is there any danger if i plug the power cable and the usb cable — but not worried about the usb part into the drive while the drive is still in the freezern and then hook it up to my laptop?

I knew it was HD failure because I was able to hear the hard drive trying to go on and off, and it just kept restarting itself. Anyways I took the HD out of the ipod, and stuck it in the freezer over night, and the next morning everyone was amazed that it worked. Whats more amazing, I did it 3 months ago… and no more problems at all.

Still no problems. How I think this works is the reading head gets worn away, and loose after some use. I noticed that I could always boot up my computer in the morning. So the freezer might be shrinking what was stretched out over time. It froze on me so i force quit and restart the computer. So, im guessing that im one of the unlucky person to try this experiment. I have a Toshiba gb external hard drive and as of yesterday afternoon has been working nicely.

Then when I plugged it in after a few hours all i got was the clicking sound for a few seconds then the light will go off and would still be clicking then the light would come back on and the clicking would go away. After reading all the testimonials I wrapped my ehd in 4 sheets of paper towels and put inside 2 ziplock bags and into our freezer. Seagate barracuda GB, something lite fell on it: I had that clicking, too. I froze it at -4 Degree, started and after spinning up the clicking was only ones.

That looked promising. I froze it to degree in my camping freezer box and than I heared a lot of different stuff, one click, than something that sounds like a rubberball would fall on a surface, and than it stopped spinning automaticly, all in one session! Next try after I let it come back to normal temperatur and freezing down degree I have got for a second a USB recognition on my XP, a window opened but without data, and you could here the arm searching.

Next try a little scatching sound came up by seaching, and that made my stop the attemts. There was a firmware error on all the drives coming out of the factory in china so I was able to send it back and have it reflashed when it started to fail. A few months after having it back however, it started making a clicking noise and would not be reconized by the bios.

It gets really cold in my room, im guessing maybe over the corse of 4 months it fixed itself? Ive backed up my photos and what not, and am currently going on 4 hours and the drive is fine. I suggest everyone fedEx their shipments for now on, I think the constant shipping of my seagate drive via UPS may have helped lead my hard drive to failure.

Has anyone else had their hard drive stop clicking on its own? Does the freezing trick work on external hard drives? Can I just put he entire unit in the freezer, or do I have to manually take out the hard drive? I am so excited to try this. I have a hard drive that crashed over a year ago. Two companies and a close friend tried to recover my lost data with no luck. I cant wait to try this out and see if works.

I have photos on that hard drive of animals that have passed on. I really pray that this works. I know this does sound crazy. I useally have to do this about every month. Your article is very good! Helpful to me, I have learned a lot of things, very grateful!

I first used it about 8 years ago on a hard drive from my old G4 powerbook, and it worked like a charm. I have a lacie gb external HD, something messed up and it would show me all my data but when trying to access any folder it would immediately freeze up.

I tried the freezer trick and sure enough! I recovered about 10 gb worth of valuable Video clips. It quit after 10 gb so I stuck it back in the freezer I waited a full day before sticking it back in. Next time I tried, It told me all folders were empty. Although in properties I could see the drive still contained all data.

So, it seems like I only got one shot. Just worked for me. Had to try it 3 times, but last time I connected power to drive, it came up, got all the data off. Very happy. I accidentally plugged my laptop transformer into my wd external drive.

Thought and hoped maybe it was the cicuit board on the caddy that was damaged so bought a new caddy and fitted the hd in that. My question is has anyone had this problem and is it fixable. Is there any way of checking this or indeed replacing the board. I have tried to place in the freezer for 1 full day and even 2 full days but it still cannot read the external disk. Put it in the freezer for two hours; spun up better but not quite there yet….

I put it in a Lil Oscar lunch cooler with freezer packs and covered with a towel to preserve the cold. My external WD MyBook is having problems. Using it with a macbook pro. I hear the clicking others have written about. My hard drive is currently in two ziplocks in the freezer. I have 8 external drives in all and this is the only one not backed-up. How embarrassing.

I have learned my lesson. Hope this works. Reading other peoples experiences have given me hope! Hi folks, I have a 1TB Samsung HD had for less than a year, and walked out of room and came back in and drive was not recognized on computer, external backup drive on a docker, connected by USB to laptop… When I rebooted, I got the click of death, and have spent 3 days mulling options.

Today a local repairman called me back and suggested the freezer. I was skeptical, but then found this forum. I will let you all know what happens…. Love this thread… ext hdd will only work for 20 minutes. Has anyone had this work with an external drive that was dropped? My speaker fell onto the portable drive!

Both broke. Mines in the freezer now.. I tried this and it made the problem worse, actually. The external hard drive fell over after I accidentally brushed up against it. So, I put it in a ziplock bag and put it in the freezer. Then I hooked it up and it made a terrible beep every second for the 5 minutes I could stand to listen to it. External harddrives are nonsense. Real technological geniuses. So I did the freezer. Drive would spin up, click, then spin down.

An external harddrive, in 2 airtight ziploc bags… 24 hours. Currently dragging my irreplaceable iphoto library onto my desktop, while the drive is covered with icepaks. I fear that 20 minutes will not be enough. I own a WD gig external hard drive that was accidentely dropped now when i plud it in it acts like it wants to boot then stops, i just put it in the freezer in 3 zip lock bags and then into a vacuum sealed bag i hope this works because all my military documents are on there as well as my movies and music.

Please let me know if anyone else had luck after a dropped drive because the data recovery company told me it would cost up to I own a Samsung gb hdd. It stopped working a week ago. Can any1 help. I accidentally unplugged it without ejecting properly from my Mac Pro. Big deal, I thought.

When plugged into a FW port on the Mac Pro, the LaCie drive light flickers, then becomes solid as if something is happening. I am willing because I am a professional video editor with work on this drive. But, I am inspired by having read these success stories with freezing — esp. If you did have the money, and the data was professional work, would you take this chance? Or is this kind of a last ditch effort? I ran a failing 2TB sata usb drive in an enclosure from my freezer for over 24 hours over the course of several days.

The drive failed the SMART diagnostic test even in the freezer, but otherwise worked fine when super cold. Just put the drive or drive plus enclosure in a ziplock bag, removing most of the air. Let it sit for at least several hours, even 24 hours.

Then run the wires from the bag. If the drive spins up and is readable, congratulations. Now copy everything you need, in order of importance.

Laughs it might sound crazy.. Been doin computer for 15 yrs. Or tale.. If you prefer! And set it on a flat surface bag still around it and place a cold drink on top of the controller board…I used to call it the brain freeze ,all kidding aside it really does work.. Hard drive continued to click when booted up. What else can I try? How cold does this have to be? My hard disk is dideckting but my drive is not showing i need my data back but how plz help me give me sum solution contact me..

Enormously insightful bless you, I reckon your current readers might possibly want a good deal more items of this nature carry on the great content. Worked for me!!

I refrigerated mine for about an hour. I was not able to get all of my data, but I was able to get the meaningful things off in time. I may try freezing it for longer and attempt to retrieve the rest of the data. Hi, When i started my laptop yesterday,the hard disk made a noise of clicking and it shows an error No bootable devices found Internal hard disk not found.

I have red above posts and want to freeze my disk. But i want to ask that after freezing do i use it as external drive or as internal hard drive only inserting it inside the laptop…i hope it wont damage the circuitry inside?

It will get hot too quickly in your computer. Please let me know your result. I am looking for another method and want to know if this works. I will try to freeze again longer to see what happens. And ideas please let me know. I tried this…kept the Goflex HDD in freeze for over 10 hours…no response. Still heard the clicking sound but was undetected by my PC.

Any ideas? I dropped my hitachi hard drive once and that made it unresponsive. It does not making a beeping noise or a clicking noise. The logo still lights up and i hear it going on, but then it just stops. I just had a seemingly innocent drop of an older external Maxtor of about 2 feet onto carpet.

The light is on steady and I can only hear it if I put my ear against the case…slight whirring, split second interruption, slight whirring, split second interruption, over and over and then it stops all together. I tried another laptop that it had never been plugged into…this time, it tried to install the Maxtor driver, but failed. His comment is the only instance I have found that freezing should be a last resort…is his statement true?

I put it in the freezer and it started fine. I told him to not let it turn off because I doubt that trick works again. I learned this from my old slider phone working after i left it out in the cold. The wires that connected the screen to the guts had been worn down from opening and closing.

I have had to put the HP in the freezer again and it worked. I have tried this technique. After freezing it, it makes a louder clicking noise that stay regular, so basically got worse I guess. Thanx in Advance….

I have tried using the freezer technique for my Western Digital External HD, Its working fine as far as reading is concerned, there is a blinking light on HD and it says the drive is now ready to use, but i am unable to see the drive in my computer. Please help… I have 1TB of data to be copied from it.

I have the same problem I just read the post and try it today If you got your data out please let me know. I have wd passport 1 TB drive.

My situation is dire. I need to have get complete data for my phd thesis. I have some backup but not complete. My Gb buffalo portable hard disk has ticking sound and I cannot access the files either with softwares. But during process of trying to recovery, ticking sound stops sometimes. Is this a good sign?. Any other suggestions? Will freezing works?

Please help! Hey, so i tried this freezing and i left it from 1pm-9pm the harddrive but when i put it back into the computer it still says boot system and makes the clicking noise?.. Has anyone tried this with a WD Passport and had success? This absolutely works. Be patient though. I first freezed a WD drive for about 3 hours, and got only a few mins out of it. Then overnight, and got about 10 mins out of it.

I just took it out after 2 days, and got ALL the files that I wanted to recover!! It was still going fine when I disconnected it a good 1 hour later!! By the way, to make best use of the short time you might have, I recommend buying an external connection kit. All you need is a kit with the right cables, including power. The kit was absolute salvation in my case… I was even thinking that since the kit allows me to have the drive out of the computer case, on the floor, I could continue to keep it cold with ice packs, but it was not necessary.

Best of lucks!! And, again, be patient, and freeze the drive for as long as you can. You will actually save yourself some time, and grief. My external stopped working a few months ago…I was going to bring it to a computer place to try and get the files off of it because I have alot of Pay To Use PSP Tubes on there along with music and photos and it would cost me to get them replaced.

So I am trying the freezing the hard drive right now and hopefully by tomorrow afternoon I can get to my stuff…my external doesnt click, and it sounds like it is spinning, but it just wont let me get my files. It is saying it is a bad hard drive…. This freezing method is fake!

They create this topic just to draw visitors into this website only, dont waste your time. It is also gives me the clicking noise, after several years of use. I came across this web site and want to try this method out.

I have a laptop still in warrenty which took a bang and is now not recognised, I am desperate to get the data back on it BEFORE i send it back to where I bought it because the last time this happened they just replaced the HDD. Does this actually work? No it will not work. Probaly there is an application or a bootable cd that was sold together your laptop that does the work. You just save 4 months of photos and videos of my babies. My HD failed, it begin to stop 10 seconds after plugging it in.

This idea sound crazy to me, so I did not put the HD in the freezer although it is no frost. But I do have a very cold room and we are on winter and I placed there the HD for a day. I tried this and it simply did not work. Maybe in the next 5 or 10 years that might happen. Now whenever I hook it up to a computer, it will give me a drive letter, but basically says that I need to format it to use it. The other thing it does is anytime I try to do anything on that drive, it locks up my system.

When I got it out of the enclosure, the drive was very hot. I have a gig seagate barracuda that shows boot path errors. No bad sounds when turning on the system and my hd will not boot any more. I can tell its working, but it seems to be corrupted. I called HP and was told it would be the sectors that are bad. I have fresh copy of windows xp 2…. Stupid brother in law and his old porn addition. And what souls do? This sound is the reading needle jumping across the surface of your harddisk because your harddisk surelly have bad clusters.

Yep, this is an old trick and it really works, always. But, be quickly and pay attention to the fact that you MUST close very carefully the bag within your HD otherwise it will get wet and once it got wet then you are really screwed.

My Seagate back up plus 1tb is just blinking led , with no noise or movement what so ever, what might be the issue? Check out this article that I wrote about recovering data from a crashed hard drive. I have a 1tb wd my passport external hard drive. Hi Casey, I spend hours reading the posts here, already spent days looking for the right answer. I am very interested to try this idea, but all I read is about hard drives, none mentioned about usb pen drive.

I have 2 that just stopped completely. I tried every solution I read online and in you tube, but none work. I am willing to freeze them, I wonder, have you ever heard or tried if usb flsh drive works like the hard drives, after freezing? I am desperate to get my important files, one company gave me an estimate of 1k.

I hope you can answer my questions. I hope you can help. Or do you have any other option for this. And use a copy program like TeraCopy, it helped me alot. Oh my gosh. It just stopped working. Would whir, click, then stop and kept doing that. I was worried that I was facing a very expensive bill to extract the data a process my husband had to do a couple years ago — but not for photos.

The freezing worked!! I suspect the HD might keep working for a while, too. Im so sorry to hear that, but never ever throw broken data carriers with data like that on it out.

Seriously you never know what happens in the future. I had a clicky Samsung G3 Station 1. After that I just kept putting it in the freezer for 1 hour intervals, and after about the 4th time, I was able to copy almost everything off of it apart from some stuff that seemed to be in bad sectors.

It would only make a clicky noise sometimes but then continue copying quietly afterwards. You saved me thousands of hours of downloads and data. I wrapped my external HD up really good with paper towel and plastic just as Paul mentioned earlier but also I cut holes where I can plug the usb and electrical into back of drive, wrapped connections really good and then put in ziplock bag and plastic wrapped that too before putting my external HD in deep freezer for a few hours..

I moved my pc from downstairs to kitchen I then plugged in power for HD and then usb into pc with HD still in freezer and after a week of copying files and re-freezing when needed, I have recovered my entire drive that was completely full with 1TB worth of data!!! This is why you hear the hard drive clicking noise in the drive. Or, for that matter, at an online backup company such as Carbonite or Crashplan which of course, are actually very handy to have for recovering the key parts of your data, for future reference.

If you do, kudos to you. All you have to do now is simply restore all of your data onto a brand-new hard drive. Is just not worth saving at this point, especially because of the fact that you know that you have all of your data backed up on another hard drive. As a result, you are probably looking for a data recovery solution that will enable you to at least get back the most critical bits of data that you have stored on your now broken hard drive.

No problem. If you are early in the process, and your hard drive is not actually that damaged because of the drive head misalignment, you may be able to get your data back yourself. There are two ways you can go about this:. Now, first the disclaimer: we would never recommend this route. As data recovery professionals, we have seen this particular method destroy quite a lot of data on quite a lot of hard drives. But, we have also seen it recover data. Remember though that if you attempt this, you had better be certain that you are going to be okay with potentially losing your data permanently.

So… Are you still with us? Are you sure you would just rather contact a professional data recovery technician in order to find out what the safest route to data recovery is? If not, here is what you may want to do.

Again, remember that we do not recommend this nor are we liable for any of the actions you take because of this article. There is a possibility that your hard drive is still functioning, but the clicking hard drive is obviously a sign that it will not be working for too much longer.

So, what you can potentially do is get a Windows startup disk such as the ones that we used to be a will to create in Windows 98 and XP , and attempt to do a full disk copy from DOS to recover data.

This is a typically low-end operation and is probably the least dangerous thing to do when you have a clicking hard drive.