Clunking / other strange hard drive noises
Summary:
In short, if your drive is making strange noises that you haven’t heard before, we recommend turning it off immediately and calling the pros at IT Data Recovery. A hard drive with abnormal clicking is almost always caused by physical problems (even if the drive hasn’t been dropped), and continuing to power on and spin up a clicking drive can allow the potential damage to spread and can quickly make an already-bad situation much worse.
The Symptoms:
You power the computer on or power-on and plug-in an external drive and hear clicking noises that sound different than the normal sounds your drive has always made. Most-likely the drive doesn’t detect, but even if it does, if it’s still making the clicking noises, we don’t recommend continued efforts without professional data recovery equipment. If it’s clicking after having been dropped, the problem is almost certainly bad heads and at least minor platter damage, which usually requires professional cleanroom data recovery work.
The one situation where we might say to try anything on your own, would be if you’re plugging a portable drive into a different computer than normal and if the drive worked fine before on the original computer, but clicks on the new computer. Some USB ports output lower amounts of current than others, and the portable hard drive worked fine before but not on the new machine, perhaps you should try the drive again on the original computer / port, or in another USB socket. Besides this one rare potential situation with low-power USB ports, a clicking hard drive is almost always in bad shape and in need of professional service.
The Good News:
IT Data Recovery has recovered thousands of clicking drives, beeping drives, and drives that make other strange noises due to physical failure. It’s one of the more common issues for us to face, and even though the problem is often severe, we are still successful a majority of the time as long as the platters haven’t been scratched too badly (though this is sometimes the case).
The Solution:
If your drive is clicking, don’t waste any time with non-cleanroom level data recovery shops. Bring your drive into the experts at IT Data Recovery so we can evaluate how bad the situation is, and we’ll let you know what will be required for successful recovery.