Harddrive Clicking?

[Dakalador]

I'm not all too sure how the "click of death" sounds but, my harddrive makes the sound of it turning on and off, and I guess that counts as a click. It's not my master harddrive and when it gets up to loading a profile it just starts clicking wildly (The first massive amount of clicks occurred was while I was just using the computer). During this, all programs would start slowing down.

It has made this sound before but, only once in a week or so. This harddrive is pretty old, I'd say about 4-5 years old.

At the time I recently installed an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro with an extra LCD monitor. I just said that in hope that it could just be a lack of power although, it happened 2-3 hours after installation.

My Specs:
Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz
A-Bit IS7-E
1 GB Corsair Memory
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (Previously a Geforce 4 TI 4400)
300 Watt PSU (Antec)
200 GB HDD, 60 GB HDD

Everything is fairly new except for the 60 GB HDD and 9800 Pro.

If this is the "click of death" what would be thes action to take in recovering the files? I probably only need to transfer about 5-10 GB of files.

 

[FlyingPenguin]

Clicking with slow downs or freezing at the same time = dying drive (yes, this is the "Click of Death").

I would recommend you immediately start copying anything you want off that drive. If you have room on your master drive copy it there. I would recommend copying it to a drive as opposed to burning it directly to a CD or DVD because the drive may stall on your during the copy.

Probably best if you copy one folder at a time. If you have a problem copying a folder (it errors out in the middle of the copy) then you'll have to try copying the file it failed on by itself and hope it eventually reads it. Then you can copy the remaining files once you're past the "bad spot".

The less you use the drive before you copy it the better. It's days are extremely numbered and the more you use it the worse it will get. You rarely get much advanced warning with modern drives. Copy it all now before it's too late.

Good luck!

 

[Stonesoldier]

click of death sounds like a large clock ticking
if thats the sound its makeing get any data off that drive before it dies completely

I had one do the click o death last month
lost 30 gigs worth of music / photos / crap ect ect

if the drive has already died theres not much that you can do

some times freezing it works
put it a sealed ziplock and stick it the freezer overnight
then hook it up and get the data off it
the freezer didnt work for me but people have had some luck with it

I have also heard some people have switched the Pcb board on the drive
its easy to do BUT you have to have the same exact board
once again didnt work for me

hitting the drive with a rubber mallet works for stuck bearings
but thats different than the click of death

if that doesnt work you might have to send it out and have the pro's do it
costs between $500 to $3500



cant remember what causes the click of death
would like to know myself

 

[Dakalador]

Ah, thanks for the replies.

However, I'm not too sure if I can even get past the profile selection screen. Everything slows down a considerable amount even though I've only had it on for about 30 seconds with the massive amount of clicks.

I'll try freezing it and giving it a shot sometime this week. And try to find out a way to boot up that's less intensive on the slave drive.

 

[FlyingPenguin]

Freezing is last resort, and really only helps when you have a striction issue. What you have are physically damaged sectors.

Profile Selection? You mean user logon? If this is not your main drive then it shouldn't even be accessed until you open it in Explorer view, unless you have some apps installed on it that load during bootup.

Try booting into Safe Mode and see if you can access it.