Recover files from old Drives suffering click of death?

[Johnrh253]

I have 3 old Disk drives that have sufferd Click of death issues. I want to know of any tricks for recovering files off of them. There were some very good photos on them. as well as other files.

 

[DSzymborski]

If the drives can still be recognized by Windows, either connected directly or using a USB hard drive enclosure, software solutions like EaseUS or Recuva can frequently recover files, depending on how damaged the drive is. After that, you're going to need a data recovery firm that opens up hard drives in clean environments with specialized tools, and that can easily go over $1,000.

With hard drives, the only way to protect important files is *before* the hard drive breaks - think of backing up to one or more methods (extra hard drive, optical disk, cloud) as a basic part of PC maintenance, akin to changing your furnace's air filter or your car's oil.

 

[elbert]

You can use boot disk or USB utility disks to try copying them. Hiren or UBD are two good options. They each have a huge number of recovery and disk repair tools.
http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

If these doesn't work its near impossible. If you have no other options you can try freezing them depending on the problem. Sometimes freezing will unstick the read write head from the platter.