Click 'o Death

[banesong]

Well, though I hate to say it, one of my hard drives is emmiting the Click 'o Death. I would appreciate any help in retrieving the data off the drive. My problem is that the data is pretty important, and that the drive was actually the backup method I was using for another location (grin... ain't inexpensive HDDs great!). Anyway, when I connect power to the HDD, it emits a click about once every second and a half, so it might be that the read head traverse arm is not moving the full amount... am not sure. This is a SCSI device; when I boot, the BIOS hangs for a few seconds longer on that device ID, it detects the manufacturer and model number, but then comes up with "device not ready". Long and the short of it: is it possible to get the data off this drive without sending it to one of those expensive specialists?

 

[Lucol]

Well, I've had a lot of experience with the "click o death" you're talking about, but in my case with IDE drives, but it's the same thing. I was never able to rescue the info off of those drives. It looks like you might need to dish out the $$$ with one of those specialists 🙁
And about the drive arm, you're correct, the arms stays in the mid portion of the drive and goes no further. It doesn't do the full sweep of the drive when it does it's own POST so to speak. I took the top of one of the drives that had the problem to see what was going on, I even tried forcing the arm to sweep the full platter area, but it always went back to the middle and repeated the clicks.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Lucol on 12/27/00 02:20 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Kodiak]

theoritically, what you COULD do is take out the platters and put them into an identical drive case... I don't think you can do that yourself though, I'm afraid -- that's why the specialists are paid the big bucks

 

[Bandit]

If you're data is really that important, pay the guys who know what they are doing. Any advice I could give you would be a shot in the dark at best, and could render your data totally irretrievable at worst.

 

[Guest]

Im glad Im not the only one who has had this problem, mine only had about6 months of Baldurs gate saves on it, ah heck