Clicking Hard disk

[mengfei]

Has anyone here successfully repaired a just ticking or clicking hard drive specifically from Hitachi or WD
also others like cannot read or other HD problem, is there still a solution to fix them?

[james_s]

Not that I know of. There are data recovery specialists out there that do this but it is a pretty specialized set of skills and without being properly equipped and experienced you stand a high risk of destroying the drive further. How much is the data on it worth?

[mengfei]

two of them are 1TB (WD Green) & a 3TB Hitachi 

[thermistor-guy]

Not that I know of. There are data recovery specialists out there that do this but it is a pretty specialized set of skills and without being properly equipped and experienced you stand a high risk of destroying the drive further. How much is the data on it worth?

I visited one recovery shop. It had its own clean room, for swapping head assemblies. It's amazing what they can do.
The owner explained to me that they will keep trying, for months but carefully, to repair the drive and recover as much data as possible.
Very specialized skill set required.

Its up to the client how far the shop will pursue it. How much is the data worth to the OP?

[fzabkar]

I visited one recovery shop. It had its own clean room, for swapping head assemblies. It's amazing what they can do.

Read this horror story:

https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=43259

Now ask yourself which data recovery professional in Australia would you entrust with your precious data.

[Berni]

There are some easy tricks like cooling down the drive or giving it a carefully dosed hit to unstick heads.

But those only work if you are lucky. In a lot of cases the drive needs a transplanted controller PCB or replacement heads. If the data is very valuable to you then DO NOT try to fix it yourself. Don't even power on the drive anymore, send it to a data recovery service.

But your data has to be really worth it to go that route as it easily costs 500$ or up into the 1000s depending on how tricky it is to get the data off it.

Otherwise treat this as a lesson that any HDD you have could fail today with no warning. Anything that is important should have a backup or at very least some sort of redundant RAID setup. You can get 5TB HDDs for 100$ so not having space to do backups shouldn't be an excuse.

[octillion]

I have done head swaps successfully on two occasions, however never with anything important.  For valuable data I would go with data recovery experts.  I've done this on a ~200 MB 1990's Western Digital Caviar, and a 40 GB Western Digital, at home without specialized tools.

Doing a head swap requires having an identical hard drive available as a donor.  I kept my work area clean, wore gloves, and gently dusted all parts with canned air to remove any dirt that may have settled before closing up.

For both the failed and donor drives, with tweezers I carefully lifted each head, then slipped PTFE tape underneath to allow the heads to slide along the disks for removal without damaging the platters or heads.  The tape extends off the edge of the platter so the heads slide right off the platter and the opposing heads then press against each other with two layers of PTFE tape between them.  This prevents the donor heads from smashing together, and allows them to easily separate for reinstallation.

Reinstalling the heads is essentially the same process in reverse; this step is tricky, especially so with multiple platters.

I later attempted recovery on a 2.5" laptop drive for a friend who decided it wasn't worth paying for proper data recovery, and he was willing to risk permanently losing his data plus destroying a new donor drive.  I was much more careful this time, and even did the swap inside a clean room, but the smaller parts were very difficult to handle.  I was unable to get the drive working (swapped PCBs first, then swapped heads and tried both PCBs).

[mengfei]

thanks for the inputs guys, these are really not that important files, well I guess lol, these drives could have been a backup of some of my old SCH/ PCB design  from my previous company that went bust so no server to get back to.

I do have similar working drives & could try swapping the PCB's first & see what happen after that..... if all fails I'll just have to check out those Hard Disk DIY projects like using those spinning motor for something 

[Berni]

It is not really worth fixing drives to actually use them to store data.

Drives that already had problems are likely to be very unreliable or short lived. Putting the data stored on it at risk. The emotional feeling upon loosing a lot of data is just awful. Even if i just had to reinstall an OS and all the software, that's a lot of my time wasted.

Tho i still keep old hard drives around for the case that i need to quickly test something. Like a motherboard having trouble seeing drives. I also keep an OS installed on some of these drives so that i can just plug it into a PC and have it boot up into a working instance of windows so that i can test stuff or play around. For those cases i don't really care if the drive dies, il likely overwrite and format them often anyway.

[jonpaul]

Decades old issues...search "Seagate HDD click of death"

Freezer may give temporary function to recover data, but drive is now a brick.

Use SSD in future

j

[mengfei]

How many more years do you guys think that the Mechanical Drive will be with us (production) 

[Haenk]

I've done this on a ~200 MB 1990's Western Digital Caviar, and a 40 GB Western Digital, at home without specialized tools.

That's unlikely to work with modern multi-TB HDDs. One single dust particle will likely lead to a fatal head crash.
(Anecdote back from the time: I manually fixed a crashed 44MB SyQuest-drive by bending back the upper head into the more-or-less-correct position. Worked like a charme. We had quite a lot of those things with bent heads - no wonder - the customers just smashed the cartridges into the drive...)

[mengfei]

no data is safe for us mortals, even my Burned CD files became brittle over the years, i wonder if those DVDR disk would last a bit longer

[amyk]

I've done this on a ~200 MB 1990's Western Digital Caviar, and a 40 GB Western Digital, at home without specialized tools.

That's unlikely to work with modern multi-TB HDDs. One single dust particle will likely lead to a fatal head crash.
(Anecdote back from the time: I manually fixed a crashed 44MB SyQuest-drive by bending back the upper head into the more-or-less-correct position. Worked like a charme. We had quite a lot of those things with bent heads - no wonder - the customers just smashed the cartridges into the drive...)

Some interesting counterpoints from someone who worked in the HDD industry: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/what-to-do-with-a-hdd-motor/msg129452/#msg129452

If you want to go down the rabbithole, search for "thermal asperity"...

[mengfei]

woooah! cool info there 

i'll be looking for some hard disk projects on the net coz it seems like 3 of them are totally trashed

[magic]

Not multi-TB, but I have opened a 320GB laptop disk for repair and it still worked enough to recover virtually everything.

[m k]

Me too, period was around 500G.
Finally opening, made them working and then closing them.
And then making a backup during that same session, then scrapping them.

One time when a friend popped in with one of those the problem was that he wanted all with him when he leaves and I connected the backup thing to 1.x USB.