Hard drive makes a clicking noise and doesn't work

Jay1701

Jay1701

Jay1701

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Hello, I have a Hitachi 160GB 7200Rpm Sata hard drive, and its stopped working, when I boot my machine up, it'll make very quiet beeping noises and loud clicking noises, and then it says Boot disk failure. I have important info on the drive, so is there anything I can do to fix it?

Thank you.
 
Probably not but you could try slaving it in another PC and see if you can retrieve anything. No consolation now I know, but that's the importance of backups in this digital age
 
It rather depends on what's happened to the drive. I had a clicker that refused to be recognised correctly by the BIOS and upon closer inspection (opened it up) I noticed that 3 or 4 mm of one of the platters was gouged out by a crashed head. I just wanted the magnets at the time so wasn't trying to fix.

First thing I'd do is check the BIOS and see what it's reported as anything. It could just be that the boot sector has corrupted and will be readable when used next to a different boot drive, in another machine perhaps.

Sometimes slaving an identical drive controller on can help if the drive control board has fizzed.

Otherwise you are talking data recovery. Not sure if data recovery software will help in this instance but might be worth a try. Otherwise there are expensive companies that'll extract all valid data for you if you have deep pockets. It depends on how important the data is to you.
 
Tealc said:
First thing I'd do is check the BIOS and see what it's reported as anything. It could just be that the boot sector has corrupted and will be readable when used next to a different boot drive, in another machine perhaps.
Click to expand...

Providing the BIOS can detect the drive I use the spinrite software to test and repair HDDs.

There's isn't much more I can add that tealc hasnt said already

*edit* Ooooo except for googling for ultimatebootcd or a similar bootdisk. They are packed with useful tools, pretty sure the UBC includeds HDD diagnostic tools from a number of manufacturers
 
Last edited:
The problem is the bios can't detect the boot drive, when I plug it into the sata port, switch it on, the splash screen hangs and it goes boot drive failure,
 
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