Drive spins.....but makes clicking noises and isn't recognied

[Delaney_Sullivan]

Recently my 2 TB seagate drive that I've had for years is no longer recognized. This hard drive has all my data on it with no backup, over 5 years of pictures, documents, etc. point being I NEED this data it's very important to me. So I'll explain the situation and what lead up to it. My computer has had some issues in the past such as faulty SATA cables and my motherboard being replaced 3 times. I had first gotten my computer in 2011 and made multiple and various upgrades throughout the year when in 2013 I went out and bought a new Tower, motherboard, GPU, and CPU. This setup worked flawlessly for about six months then I started to have some issues with the hard drive. what had happened was every time I would start my computer from this point the computer would be stuck in a infinite loading screen. the computer would start up get past the motherboard manufactures logo, get to the windows icon and would just load forever. I left it on for days before to see of it would eventually load and it never did. so one day i though "eh i have two drive in here, both with windows 8 on them, a boot up the other one and as long as the data's accessible what do I care." So i booted up my other drive, all the data from my original drive was accessible but just wouldn't boot, at the time i just brushed it off. This compromise had worked fine for about another six months then it happened again, but to my second drive. This time when I switched the boot order to my original it worked, odd right. Finally I was able to use my original hard drive once again, I felt so relieved. Only recently in December of 2015 the infinite loading load had happened again, only this time neither drive could be booted. After talking to one of my friends who works as a specialist in computer repair told me it was most likely the motherboard, I had a two year warranty in the motherboard so i decided to get a new one. When I had installed the new motherboard everything had worked perfectly both drives could be booted and everything worked perfect. I had never even though perhaps something was wrong with the drive, that changed in March of this year. One day I was on my computer browsing the web and suddenly it froze, I rebooted the computer, opened the boot menu and saw that the hard drive wasn't even listed. I though this was strange as the hard drive was still spinning and perhaps it was a faulty SATA cable, so I plugged the drive in another computer to see if it would read it. the drive was not recognized on this computer either, and that's when i noticed a strange scratchy/clicking noise from the drive. I immediately knew something was wrong with the drive and removed it from the computer. Something is obviously wrong with the drive does anyone know what it is or how to fix it? any help would be much appreciated, the data on the drive means a lot to me. Thank you in advanced for your help.

 

[CountMike]

There's no fixes for things like that, at least not at home level. As far as you wrote you had enough warning that something bad is going to happen. Important data is never left on one storage device. More important data is, on more devices it should be backed up.
"Click of death" is known syndrome since first HDD was invented.

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Welcome to the community, @Delaney_Sullivan!

I'm afraid that @CountMike is totally right! 🙁 Clicking noises, even though the HDD spins, most probably indicate that you are dealing with internal hardware issue on the drive itself. This is something that cannot be fixed and if you do any data recovery attempts by yourself, they could be potentially dangerous to the contents on the drive. Since the data is so important to you, your best bet on getting it back would be a professional data recovery company. I'd strongly recommend you get in touch with such a service company and let them assist you with the data recovery. 🙁

In the future, ALWAYS make sure you backup your data to at least one more location (storage device). Remember that 'backup' means that you have your data stored in at least two (2) locations. Moving data from your system drive to an external or another internal hard drive is not a backup, unless there is already a duplicate of the file on a different drive!

Hope this was helpful. Best of luck!
SuperSoph_WD

 

[Nine Layer Nige]

Your cheapest option right now is to connect your broken drive either via a USB/SATA dongle or as a secondary SATA drive to a different working PC. Then use Computer Management/Disk Management console to see if you can see the broken drive (you may need to click Rescan Disks). If you can see it then you might be able to view the folders on it in File Manager and retrieve your precious files onto a 3rd HDD.
If you can see the HDD in Disk Management but cant see folder in File Manager then try Recuva (same people who make CCleaner) to scan the broken HDD for files. This might take A VERY LONG TIME to scan. I'm talking days but might save your bacon.