Wd external hard drive making clicking sounds

[rajt7493]

Hello,
I have a wd external 1tb hard drive. It was working fine uptil now but all of a sudden when I connect it to the computer it starts making a clicking sound and its not showing up in my computer.
I checked the disk manager and the disk shows up but says it is not initialized, when I try to initiate it it says could not initialized because of fatal hardware error.
I checked the bios and the booting options and it shows up there.
I checked it in a different pc but same thing there.
Any help would be great I have years of work stored in there.

 

[faalin]

Normal platter drives when you hear a clicking sound is not good and means the drive is dyeing or is dead. Depending on how old the drive is you might get a replacement for WD, or you could try and crack the case open and plug it in internally to a computer to see if it will work.

 

[Ralston18]

Clicking is, unfortunately, a bad sign.

Especially if the problem follows the drive versus occurring with just one particular computer.

Anything you do may cause more damage and/or data loss.

One option is to download WD's Drive Diagnostic software and test the drive.

May or may not be able to identify a specific problem and, again, at the risk of doing more damage.

Does the drive feel overly warm or even hot? Sometimes a cooler environment will forestall a problem. Be sure that the drive is well ventilated and otherwise not situated to allow proper cooling.

There might be some possibility with respect to the MBR.

Reference:

https://www.easeus.com/partition-manager-software/fix-master-boot-record-of-this-hard-drive-is-damaged.html

However, hold on that sort of solution for the moment. See what else may be learned and look for additional responses to your post. Someone else might offer further insight and suggestions.

There used to be a couple of WD folks monitoring and participating in this Forum. Have not noted them responding for awhile...

 

[RolandJS]

Before doing anything else concerning diagnostics, consider: do you have current, restorable, backup images on external media? If yes, then of course you can restore upon a replacement HDD. If not, I hope you can boot a USB or DVD boot of the backup / restore utility of your choosing, and make full images of your OS and Data partitions, or, images of your Data folders and files at the very least -- onto affordable, reliable, external media.
** Never mind the above!! I just now re-read the opening post. The only solution now at this point: send or bring the HDD, making no more attempts to fix it!, to any data recovery company / specialist and let them recover the recoverable. Any further attempts of DIY will very likely cause a major increase in the cost of data recovery and much less data recovery success. **

 

[USAFRet]

"I checked it in a different pc but same thing there. "

It's dead, Jim...🙁

All electronics works great, right up until the moment it fails.

A file that lives in a single location or drive may be said to not exist at all.
This is why we harp on backups so much. Drives die. Eventually, all of them.

I'd say try the WD DataLifeguard test suite, but that looks unlikely to work with this drive.