skorpio 0 Posted June 22, 2004 i have a seagate 40 gig hdd, it worked fine till one nice sunny day it just died for no apparent reason. i have a lot of stuff on it that i dont want to lose. i can detect it in bios, cant boot from it, cant see it in dos, winme, xp, or linux. the hdd makes clicking noises, doesnt sound too healthy. i used "easy recovery" by ontrack, it couldnt even figure out what file system is on the hdd. the first time it stuffed up i couldnt boot from it, gave me some read error crap, i pushed enter couple times and it booted, worked fine for a week or so, and then one day the same error popped up, and pushing enter didnt help that time. so the general feeling im getting bout it is that all the specs of it can be detected(bios) but when it comes to accessing anything else on the hdd, it just dont work, its like as if it cant "start up", cant even see it in fdisk any1 got any ideas???? Antonio Share this post Link to post
jmmijo 1 Posted June 22, 2004 Sorry to be the barrer of bad news but the click of death is just that, a hard cluster/sector/media error Unless you're willing to pay 100's if not 1000's to send the drive into a professional recovery house you're *not* going to be able to recover any of that data with the products available on the retail market. Now I'm a big proponent of a product called R-Studio but most likely it will not be able to reciver anything either due to the fact that the drive is not seeking track zero properly. You can try the freezer trick and see if that helps or not, some users have gotten this to work but I doubt it will in this case. Basically just stick the drive into an anti-static bag, then tape shut. Place it in another anti-static bag then tape that shut. Finally I would place it in a freezer bag then ziploc that shut and leave for a day or two. Chances are good that the click of death will return however Share this post Link to post
jmmijo 1 Posted June 24, 2004 Sometimes yes and sometimes no, so far I've had very mixed success with this trick The idea of the bags is to actually cut down on condensation and moisture... Share this post Link to post
AndyFair 0 Posted June 25, 2004 I think, IIRC, that the click of death is caused by an overheating controller IC on the drive. Freezing the hard drive is supposed to give you enough time to pull any data off the chip before it becomes too hot again (the trick is to use the drive as soon as you take it out of the freezer) The problem is that by the time the click of death starts, the IC is usually already fubar... Rgds AndyF Share this post Link to post
