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160GB SATA Maxtor HD going click, click, click, click. . .

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Polishwonder74

Senior member
Ok, so I just got this 160GB 8MB cache SATA Maxtor drive from Newegg, and I was moving all my stuff onto it so that I can reinstall XP on my 80GB SATA Maxtor, eliminate my IDE drives and use the big 160 as storage space.

As I was moving all my crap over onto the new drive it started clicking and then XP froze up. I restarted the computer, and when I went to open up the drive from 'My Computer', it started clicking again and froze. I restarted again, and then it just started clicking right away and the SATA Bios didn't recognize it at all.

I let it cool for a couple minutes, gave it a shot again, and same thing. Click, click, bios doesn't recognize it. Right now I've got it cooling in front of a fan before I try anything. The noise I hear sounds like: click-click. . . .click-click. . . . . .click-click. . . .

I've heard myths and stuff about putting hard drives in freezers, fridges, driving around with it in your trunk for a week and some other crazy things. Do I have any hope at all of recovering at least SOME of the stuff on there? I got about 70 GB of stuff on there before it crapped out.

Please help. . . 🙁
 
technically the freezer trick shouldn't work anymore these days, and it was only suppose to be for old style ball bearings for the platters. either way,i found that it still works today, i've done it a few times. put it in a ziplock baggy overnight and try it,its worth a shot.

in the meantime, LEAVE IT OFF. the more you turn it on,the more damage your probably doing.
 
if the heads are making the clicking noise,it means there is an error and they keep re-parking. no software in the world will help that.
 
Make sure you don't have a lot of stuff attached to a single power line. Once, I thought I would be real clean with the install as all my drives could connect to one line from the power supply. It booted okay, but every now and again I could hear the heads parking and the drive spinning back up. Took awhile to figure out what the problem was, but rearranged the wiring and presto! Something for you to try anyway, hope it might solve your problem.
 
Argh, no dice. I let it cool down in front of a fan for a few hours and plugged it in on its very own power plug. Still nothing.

This is killing me, does anyone know of any magic procedure that will give me a shot at bringing it back to life even for only a short time? (Other than the freezer trick which I already know)

Thanks, fellas.
 
for future reference, copy and delete instead of cutting and pasting....i've learned that lesson a few times myself :-/ good luck
 
Yeah, I did that, in fact. When I first started moving my stuff over to the new drive I copied it for about the first 10 - 15 GB, and when the hard drive held it for a day, ran everything, and appeared generally healthy, I figured it was safe, so I figured I might as well just move instead of copy.

Dirty Bastards, this is the type of thing that would cause someone to never buy a Maxtor drive again.

Anyone else have any magic that might help me out here? I'm thinking about buying a new one and trying to do surgery on it myself, like try transplanting the circuit board, then maybe attempting to do that thing where you install the old platters in a new drive.

It might be worth taking a $100 chance to save 70GB worth of stuff.
 
putting on a new PCB won't do anything, its a physical malfunction inside the hard drive most likely.

inspect the PCB underside for any burnt traces,if you see none,its probably not worth the effort.
 
thats why i hate maxtor ever since the 8mb series started comming out. said fsb, wtf really really loud, and hard disk kept thrashing. its either seagate or hitachi for me now, or sometimes the raptor🙂
 
Ok, I seem to have my back up against the wall here. I've read that putting the hard drive in the freezer is like a 1-shot-deal. If I try the freezer trick, and it doesn't work, will I be unable to try anything else because it destroys the drive?
 
Originally posted by: HappyCracker
Make sure you don't have a lot of stuff attached to a single power line. Once, I thought I would be real clean with the install as all my drives could connect to one line from the power supply. It booted okay, but every now and again I could hear the heads parking and the drive spinning back up. Took awhile to figure out what the problem was, but rearranged the wiring and presto! Something for you to try anyway, hope it might solve your problem.
Click to expand...

What PSU was this? Sounds like some generic thing with poor regulation, thus allowing serious power dips.
 
you could send the drive to a professional data recovery service...im almost sure they could recover 80-90 % of your data, depending on the level of damage to the platters themselves.
 
What about the drop trick? I hear that dropping the drive a foot or so onto a hard flat surface can work as a last ditch effort, strangely enough. Apparently it will "un-stick" the heads if they are stuck.
 
Originally posted by: Jeff7
What PSU was this? Sounds like some generic thing with poor regulation, thus allowing serious power dips.
Click to expand...

This is a 430W Enermax. Poor regulation, no. My fault, yes. Only so much power can carried by the wires. Having four drives connected to one lead is a bad idea. A friend of mine running an Antec couldn't even get his to boot after doing something similar. I can sorta see your point, though. If it worked enough to boot the system, as that's when it's really sucking the juice down, it should work all the time. I can tell you this: my next power supply will be a PC Power and Cooling unit.

To the OP:
The freezer trick AFAIK, if the drive is dea...err dying, will bring it back long enough to perhaps save the data. And if that doesn't work, you may as well pull SickBeast's suggestion. Nothing more to lose.
 
Originally posted by: Chronoshock
As I recommended in another HD failure thread PC Inspector File Recovery works really well. Hook up the 160 in slave mode and try to grab as much as you can off of it. Some of it might be corrupted but you should be able to get some of it off.
Click to expand...

Will PCIFR help recover deleted emails from OE or is there something else?
 
my friend had this problem with BOTH of his ATA hard drives, WD and maxtor, just had to RMA them 🙁
 
Sorry to hear of your woes; you've been given good advice though.

I bought a shiny new 80GB WD-SE drive for my ex-GFs comp; installed it. 3 weeks later it just upped and died. Wouldn't even BOOT, BIOS couldn't see it. 🙁 *shrug* Who knows why this things happen?

Hopefully, you didn't lose the data...you did COPY/PASTE right?

I have backups of about 95% of all my stuff burned to DVD. Burn it, put it away and never touch it. If worse comes to worst, I'm covered.
 
Ok, an update:

I pulled out both the 160 and the 80 and I twisted them real quick in my hand and they both sound identical, so I'm assuming that the platters are turning ok. I fired it up again and I feel the platters spin up, and then the clikcing begins. Each click seems to be a pretty harsh clunk. Is it possible that like, the springs that the heads pull against came loose and are letting the head whip back and forth?

What the hell did I do to deserve this. . .
 
Originally posted by: SickBeast
What about the drop trick? I hear that dropping the drive a foot or so onto a hard flat surface can work as a last ditch effort, strangely enough. Apparently it will "un-stick" the heads if they are stuck.
Click to expand...

Uhm.. do NOT do that, with any HD.

There were some particular HDs in the past, or perhaps all older HDs, in which the bearing grease has thickened over the years, that were prone to a problem called "sticktion", that for whatever reason, the HD would generally fail to spin up, either because the bearing grease was too thick/stuck, or the head had been sitting in one place for a long time and was stuck to the platter. (Almost like rusted to it, in a way.)

For those particular drives, giving it a physical "jolt" could sometimes work, although the preferred method was to give it an on-axis "snap", spinning the case of the HD rapidly, and oftentimes that would unstick the head(s) from the platter.

However, DO NOT do this with any sort of reasonably-modern drive. They do not suffer from "sticktion" the same way, and due to much smaller drive geometries, and more sensitive heads, you will do nothing more than likely permanently damage the heads, which will make data-recovery much more difficult, one would have to send the HD off to a specialized center to do an actual head-assembly transplant, before attempting any of the more "normal" data-recovery operations. In short, again, do not do this with any sort of modern drive.

Not to mention, the problem in this case is not that the heads are stuck, rather, that they are resetting.
That indicates some sort of seek problem finding the servo-positioning information on the platter. It could be media damage, or more likely, head damage. Further head damage is unlikely to help here.
 
Originally posted by: MichaelD
Sorry to hear of your woes; you've been given good advice though.

I bought a shiny new 80GB WD-SE drive for my ex-GFs comp; installed it. 3 weeks later it just upped and died. Wouldn't even BOOT, BIOS couldn't see it. 🙁 *shrug* Who knows why this things happen?

Hopefully, you didn't lose the data...you did COPY/PASTE right?

I have backups of about 95% of all my stuff burned to DVD. Burn it, put it away and never touch it. If worse comes to worst, I'm covered.
Click to expand...

It's reasons like these that I try to keep at least semi-recent backups (no more than six months, usually), and put any new HD that I get through a torture-test for nearly a month or so, before actually putting it into service.

Even when I copy my data over, I always copy, not move, and then do a full binary file-compare over all of the files. (I use the MS "WinDiff" utility, included with their programming tools. Make sure that "Ignore blanks" is NOT checked under the settings.)

I also sometimes take out my last backup, and run a full binary-compare between my backup, and my current system image. I've actually found bit-rot data-corruption that way too, due to flaky hardware. Then again, I am a tad bit paranoid on the issue of data-integrity and security, but its served me well, for the most part, even if it does take a bit more of my time.
 
Originally posted by: Mik3y
this is y i like seagates. 🙂
Click to expand...



riiiiight, because they never break down, do they?.. :roll:

this happens to every brand of harddisks. i'm shure that if one manufacturer would be even 5% better then the others in the top field, we would never hear the end of it.

this is just typical for HDD's; they either break down after 10 minutes, or after 10 years.
 
Ok, good thing you chimed in, I was about to go for the last-ditch freezer trick.

So what do you think, do I have any hope at all of saving my stuff?
 
Originally posted by: Mik3y
this is y i like seagates. 🙂
Click to expand...

you took the words right out of my mouth.
i think honestly maxtor should go out of business so people can have reliable storage! 😛
their drives suck, and do nothing but fail... i RMA at least one a month at my company. my record was 4 in 1 month.

i'd switch, but this is all the supplier keeps in stock, oh well, at least most people back-up their stuff.
 
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