Click of death - is it fixable, or time to throw the HDD out?

[casemods]

Got a 500gb seagate that I was able to get some stuff off of, after windows did the disk check thing.

I made the mistake of running a scan with hdtune and at the lest sector, it started the click of death (this drive was mostly for movies, so I'm only really sad about the $35 I paid for the drive several years ago)

I have not really found any solid answers about whether it's fixable or not.

Side note: how can I keep a hard drive lasting longer? what are things that decrease the life span, other than shutting power off without shutting the computer down first obviously.

The 500gb was a secondary and I think I had it turn off after a while, so that might have been what caused it to die. My 300gb has over 30,000 hours on it and it's only got a few bad sectors, compared to the 500gb that has the click of death

I'm also wondering what the CRC interface error count means. Says it might be a bad cable. I have bent the cables a bit to fit in the cable management for the case. I think that might be the cause

 

[johnnyb105]

Ive seen on shows and on the net to wrap it up in a static bag and put in a freezer and then try to get your data off but I wouldn't try it myself. I would consider yourself lucky you got any data off it before you heard the click of death.

 

[Trent Quan-Sing]

The "click of death" is most definitely not fixable.

I imagine a head has come loose over the time you have had it. and needs to be realigned
If you open that drive outside a class 1 clean room you'll permanently damage it.

Unless you have thousands of dollars to build a clean room and gain the technical knowledge to do so OR get someone with a clean room to do it for you which will costs thousands, then no.

Back up all your data, take an image (if you can) and clone it to a new drive.

 

[casemods]

The "click of death" is most definitely not fixable.

I imagine a head has come loose over the time you have had it. and needs to be realigned
If you open that drive outside a class 1 clean room you'll permanently damage it.

Unless you have thousands of dollars to build a clean room and gain the technical knowledge to do so OR get someone with a clean room to do it for you which will costs thousands, then no.

Back up all your data, take an image (if you can) and clone it to a new drive.

But I can't do any of that now that it's got the click of death, right? lol..

 

[Trent Quan-Sing]

The "click of death" is most definitely not fixable.

I imagine a head has come loose over the time you have had it. and needs to be realigned
If you open that drive outside a class 1 clean room you'll permanently damage it.

Unless you have thousands of dollars to build a clean room and gain the technical knowledge to do so OR get someone with a clean room to do it for you which will costs thousands, then no.

Back up all your data, take an image (if you can) and clone it to a new drive.

But I can't do any of that now that it's got the click of death, right? lol..

Correct.

The company 'Technetics' can do amazing work in a clean room for lots of money and recover the data.
otherwise throw it in the bin.

If you are concerned about data loss in the future, try to look into a PC with RAID-5 capability. Or a RAID-1 even.

If you plug it into a computer and get a CRC error when formatting its gone. nothing on a software level can help it.

 

[mister_twister]

Time to throw away most likely, especially for $35. If you want to be sure, call these guys http://www.harddrivesforsale.com/data-recovery/ I purchase hard drives from them and they have very nice phone support and seems to be very knowledgeable.