If your hard drive gives out a repeated clicking sound,stop using it immediately,avoid opening itandabsolutelyrefrain from freezing it.
Conspicuous clicks(metal against metal), usually indicatesevere physical damage. Attempting to recover its contents or open it without specialized tools may result in further damage and make the drive even more unrecoverable.
So, if the drive contains essential data, it’s best totake it to reputable recovery professionalstoretrieve the contents.
Why is My Hard Drive Clicking?
Hard drives mainly include the following components:
After connecting the drive to a computer, the drive uses its actuator to slide the heads over the rotating platters to access the data.
Theclicking soundcomes from theactuator arm moving to and frowhen it can’t find a proper destination as itrepeatedly resets its position.
This issue can happen due to many reasons, such as:
Bad Read/Write Heads or Misaligned Actuator Arm
One of the most common reasons for this problem is abad read/write headormisalignment in the actuator arm. These issues can occur due togradual wear and tear of the components or physical damage.
When these components get damaged, thehead can’t get to the proper disk sectors and read the data. So the actuator will keep resetting and cause the clicking noise.
To fix these issues, the process is toreplace the actuator arm and the read/write heads from a compatible donor drive.
It needs to be carried out in aclean location with precise and skilled hands. Even a little scratch or misalignment can severely hamper the chances of data recovery. However, skilled data recovery experts can almost always recover data from such hard drives.
Firmware (Service Area) Corruption
A hard disk drive contains a special location called theservice area or system area which stores the firmware. This piece of software is responsible for all the functionalities of the disk.
