Toshiba 500GB HDD gives like a "click of death" but windows still picks up the drive, but unable to recover data

[RiaanHenning]

Toshiba 500GB HDD gives like a "click of death" but windows still picks up the drive, but unable to recover data. Quick explaination of whats happening. I connected the drive as a slave to my PC and when I boot up my PC the "broken' HDD starts spinning as normal even when I am on the desktop it doesn't make any noises, but as soon as I want to access the drive or if windows wants to do something with the drive then only it gives out a huge scratch sound and starts with the "click of death" sound but not like a usual click of death more of a slow unable to read click because it only happens every 10 - 20 seconds if I am trying to access the drive, if I quit all programs and explorers and returned to the desktop the clicking stops. My question would be what would this type of fault be? I want certain data on there but not so much to send it to data recovery places or to buy the exact same hdd for a conversion swap. If I could know what the issue is then only can I decide what to do with the drive

 

[R_1]

the huge scratch sound makes me think HDI - Head to Disk Interface or the head is in contact with the disk and wherever the head contacts the disk the data is gone, the heads are most likely gone and the magnetic material that holds the data - "pixie dust" - has been removed from the aluminium disk.
The above is the worst case scenario for any hard drive.

 

[Anthony Mondz]

How old is the drive?