Help in Retrieval of data from old hardrive (not recongnised by pc).

[Huskyman06]

Hello, my parents 8-9 year old computer recently started acting up and then on a restart the bios would run fine but the OS wouldnt start, just a black screen. Well I opened the computer and took out the hard drive, its a 320 gb seagate barracuda 7200 prob. 8-9 years old. I bought a sata to usb adapter to connect the hard drive to my laptop to retrieve the years of pictures(lots of very crucial pictures of multiple family members). When connected to my laptop, the drive was not recognized neither in disk management or file explorer. It also makes a very slight clicking sound, I need help to retrieve this precious data.

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

Clicking sound from a hard drive is bad news I'm afraid as it means the drive has failed (we call it the "click of death").
Only a data recovery service can retrieve data from it using specialised equipment, but the service is very expensive as it's frequently used by businesses and large corporations who can & will pay any price to get data recovered rather than lose valuable customers.

Your parents should have taken the sensible precaution of backing up their files to a second drive or to optical discs because all hard drives fail at some point. It's done well to have lasted 8 years, many don't get past 5.

 

[fzabkar]

Is the clicking very faint? Does it sound more like beeping? Does the drive actually spin up? If not, then there may be a stiction fault or seized spindle bearing.