WD Scropio Blue Making Clicking Sound

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Doug_14

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Apr 21, 2016
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Hi - my WD Scropio Blue laptop 320GB HD in my Inspiron N5040 has died and will only make a clicking sound now when in the system or removed and placed in a drive enclosure.

Does anyone have any ideas how I can attempt to recover the data? At the moment, when I plug the drive into my desktop (using the USB enclosure) it is now even recognized.

Please help. This is my sisters, and I've given her the "why didn't you backup pep talk already."
 
Solution
bloodroses
The hard drive freezer trick is a myth now:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3035017/storage/that-old-freezer-trick-to-save-a-hard-drive-doesnt-work-anymore.html

If you open the drive and expose the platters to normal air (non-clean room), the platters are toast as the distance the heads use to read the platters inside the drive is smaller than a particle of dust.

Unless you pay a very expensive price to get the drive data off through a clean lab, that data is gone. I had a similar problem happen about a year ago with 2 drives (normal and backup) that died within a week of each other; losing nearly 2tb of stuff.
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DSzymborski

DSzymborski

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Nov 19, 2010
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So long as you've given her the backup lecture already, the best way to recover it is to put it in an enclosure, connect it to another PC with EaseUs or Recuva, and hope that the other PC can read this drive long enough to recover the most important data. After that, your option is mainly nice people in white lab jackets in clean rooms with specialized equipment dissecting your hard drive and charging you or your sister handsomely for the process.
 
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Doug_14

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Apr 21, 2016
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The trouble I am having though is that the drive is not recognized when I plug it into my PC. I just makes the clicking sound and is not recognized. Is there anything that I can try at this point? I've heard some people put them in the freezer, one guy took his drive apart and helped unseat the head....I don't know. The white jacket $$$ is not an option for us.
 
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DSzymborski

DSzymborski

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People have reported *occasionally* that the freezer method works, but the exact problem has to be almost a very specific one for that to work at all.

If you can't get it to read on any PC and can't spend the $ to have data recovery, you're pretty much out of options so I supposed freezing it can't hurt. Failing that, unless you're of the mind to put the hard drive in storage until some time in the future that data recovery *can* be paid for, you're out of options.

Taking it apart yourself will mostly just guarantee there will never be a day when anyone can get anything off of it. You can if you've exhausted your other choices and it's already game over, but at that point, it's mostly a learning experience to see how a mechanical hard drive works, not a process that will actually recover your data.
 
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DSzymborski

DSzymborski

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Nov 19, 2010
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Hard to say. There's not much A/B testing done with the hard drive freezing experiment and the very occasional people that have reported success don't know what was actually wrong with their hard drive.
 
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Doug_14

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Apr 21, 2016
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ok, thank you - do you know the name/type of the screwdriver to open this hard drive? It's not a phillips, maybe some proprietary to WD. Might as well have some fun with it...
 
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bloodroses

bloodroses

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Jan 27, 2013
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The hard drive freezer trick is a myth now:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3035017/storage/that-old-freezer-trick-to-save-a-hard-drive-doesnt-work-anymore.html

If you open the drive and expose the platters to normal air (non-clean room), the platters are toast as the distance the heads use to read the platters inside the drive is smaller than a particle of dust.

Unless you pay a very expensive price to get the drive data off through a clean lab, that data is gone. I had a similar problem happen about a year ago with 2 drives (normal and backup) that died within a week of each other; losing nearly 2tb of stuff.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
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