External WD HDD clicking sound, unable to see drive in computer but appears in device manager and disk mgt

[meg3den]

Hi,

Recently, I made a mistake by unplugging my WD external hard disk while my Windows was rebooting.

1. Now, when I plug in my HDD, it will make a clicking sound (for about 30 clicks) before it turned quiet (with lights still blinking away).
2. The HDD is not appearing in My Computer.
3. HDD does shows up in Device Manager.
4. HDD shown as 'unknown', 'not initialized' in Disk Management. I don't want to initialize it as I really need to recover all the data on it.
5. HDD does appear as 'My Passport' for me to eject it.

I have tried:
1. Updating the device driver
2. Uninstalling and reinstall the driver.. which was successful.
3. Plug the HDD into all the different USB ports on my laptop.
4. Plug the HDD into a different laptop (again clicking sound but does not appear as a drive).
5. Use a different cable
6. Reboot my laptop with the HDD attached and it just hangs at the first screen without even giving me a chance to press F12 to go into BIOS mode.

I'm at a loss now and of course blaming myself for not doing a backup for these important files I have in there.

Greatly appreciate any advice how I can get to access my data once again.

 

[drtweak]

Ever heard the click of death? Yea you got that. Drive is gone buddy. more than likely data recovery isn't even possible. A click drive is the heads crashing on the disk patters and thus permanently destroy the platter and all data recovery possibility.