Strategy for hard drive Click of Death crash recovery

Mishaps happen. And God forbid if you do not have the recent backup of the data.  That's a sin for which you will pay dearly.  For example it is easy to drop USB drive on the hardwood or cement floor. Often that's it. If it was connected with long enough cable and does not have free fall sensor that's it. Internal laptop drives are also can go south in the most inopportune moment. Generally 2.5" drives has lower reliability then 3.5" drives, especially in capacities close or over 1TB. Today your laptop was fine, tomorrow it's not booting.  Often after a fall a drive develops a Click-O-Death problem.  Seagate hybrid drives with SSL cache are not immude and also can die like flies.

Click of death - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

On a hard disk drive, the click of death refers to a similar phenomenon; the head actuator may click or knock as the drive repetitively tries to recover from one or more errors. These sounds can be the heads repetitively loading or unloading, or they can be the sounds of the actuator striking a stop, or both. The click of death can signal the hard drive has crashed or failed.

This click often can't be heard at the distance but it is very clear if you put a drive directly to your ear (easy with USB drives, need an additional step of putting drive into USB enclosure for primary laptop or desktop drive).

In all such cases the first rule is to avoid drastic impulsive steps. Them can make small chances that you have for recovery even smaller or equal to zero.

First of if you do not have the most current backup you need to understand that this is a very serious situation. So buying USB enclosure, a new hard drive and some additional staff is just peanuts in comparison with the value of your data. If you do not have spare USB enclosure you can get  Apricorn SATA Wire Notebook Hard Drive Upgrade Kit  that include cable to connect your drive to USB port without enclosure and disk with programs costs $19 on Amazon. It has advantage that there it is just a connect and that simplify cooling of the drive in case this is necessary to make it work for the time interval long enough to backup your data.  Dongle from Seagate Flex drives also can serve this purpose.

On a typical 320GB or 500GB laptop drive can be hundreds of valuable photos, mp3 file your notes, your programs and other valuable for you staff.  With no backup they are gone unless you try professional hard drive recovery services. The latter are very expensive.  Expect to pay ~$500 for 1Tb drive or less and double this price for drives over 1TB. Often the price of recovery of data is over $1K.

Some drives like GoFlex Turbo drive have data recovery services included in the drive price. Also some manufactures provide 5 years warranty so they can replace you broken drive for the cost of shipping it to manufacture. Check with you manufacturer.  Here are a quote about Seagate GoFlex Turbo:

The new 7200 RPM drives support the USB 3.0 standard, which is backward compatible with USB 2.0, and are 40 percent faster than USB 2.0 drives operating at 5400 RPM.

Along with increased speed, the new drives come with two years of coverage under Seagate's SafetyNet service (SRS). However, only one data recovery incident is covered in the plan. What's more, Seagate warns "not all data may be recoverable." It is also available only in the United States.

If you have a backup this is a minor nuisance. If you don't that's a terrible problem. In the latter case you need to approach it with the attention it deserves.

In case you experience problems with laptop internal drive you need to extract it and put is USB enclosure. In case the problem is with USB drive the drive is already in USB enclosure. In the latter case you need to ensure that there is no problem with enclosure -- try the same enclose with a different drive or use other enclosure to exclude pretty rare possibility that the enclosure electronics or cable went south.

There are two things you can try to get some time to backup your files from a drive with Click-O-Death problem:

• Change position of the drive in space
• Change the temperature of the drive (at least at the start period)

The first series to tries is related to an attempt to find a position in which drive still works. With booted OS try position the drive, insert the USB cable and see what happens. 

You can try a half dosen of positions

• upside down position. This often helps and I save a couple of drives this way. They were not able to work in "normal" position but happily allowed me to retrieve the data being upside down.
• Vertical position on a large edge
• Vertical position on the smaller edge
• Position on the longer edge of USB enclosure with the angle ~45% to the surface of the table (I saved one Seagate drive using this position; in all other it was not recognized by OS.
• Position in the shorter edge of USB enclosure with 45 andle to the surface of the table.

The second stage if to try to cool the drive by putting it on a metal conteiner with ice and small fan. Try several position. If one position shows sign of sucess you can once cool the drive in refrigirator freezer for say 10 min and try this position again.  Then you need to try several most pomiisng positions mentioned above, especially those in which there were some sign of sucesss before -- for example drive letter appered and then diappered in Windows Explorer. de down, and vertical).  If the first position does not work -- remove the usb cable change the position of the drive and try again. You do need to cool it again.

NEWS CONTENTS

Old News ;-)

Hard drive crashes are a nightmare for computer users for many reasons. Not only can data held dear to one's heart be lost, but trying to recover it can cost an arm and a leg, if not more. Hard drive maker Seagate attempts to address both those problems with the release today of its GoFlex Turbo drive with SafetyNet data recovery services.

Seagate claims SafetyNet data recovery is the first recovery service offering by a hard drive manufacturer to be included as part of the purchase price of an external drive.

"With this new GoFlex Turbo performance drive, it is our aim to provide more peace of mind for the people who choose Seagate to back up and store their valued digital assets," Patrick Connolly, vice president and general manager of Seagate's retail product group, says in a statement. "When our products are used as a backup to a primary system or even as supplemental storage, people should know that they can get a further layer of assurance that their data will be there when they need it."

The new turbo drives are available from electronics mega mart Best Buy for a suggested retail price of $119.99 for a 500 gigabyte drive and $139.99 for one with 750GB.

The new 7200 RPM drives support the USB 3.0 standard, which is backward compatible with USB 2.0, and are 40 percent faster than USB 2.0 drives operating at 5400 RPM.

Along with increased speed, the new drives come with two years of coverage under Seagate's SafetyNet service (SRS). However, only one data recovery incident is covered in the plan. What's more, Seagate warns "not all data may be recoverable." It is also available only in the United States.

Data recovery with the service may be accomplished either remotely or by shipping the drive back to Seagate. Usually, if the drive is operational, files can be restored over a broadband connection. If the drive is making unusual sounds or exhibiting flaky behavior, chances are it'll have to be shipped back to the shop.

If the drive needs to be sent to Seagate's labs for recovery, don't expect to get it back, the company cautions. "SRS will not return your original device since it typically will be rendered inoperable as a result of the recovery attempt," the terms and conditions for the program state. "Your original device will be subject to secure disposition following a recovery attempt," they continued. "To the extent possible, you should back up accessible data on the device before sending it back to SRS."

In the case of remote recovery, Seagate pledges to make every effort to perform the data recovery within seven days of a case file being opened on the incident. The lab turnaround time could take up to 14 days from the time the drive arrives at the lab, according to the terms and conditions of the program.

CompuRecovery Data Recovery Specials

Media Type	Data Recovery Price*
Optical Media (CD, DVD, Blu-Ray, etc.) Flash Memory Cards (SD, MMC, Compact Flash, etc.) USB Flash Drives Magnetic Media (Floppy & Zip/Jaz Disks)	$345.00
Laptop, Desktop and Mini(1.8") Hard Drives less than 500GB SCSI Drives less than 120GB SSD Drives less than 64GB Smartphones, PDA & Tablet PC's with flash memory under 32GB	$595.00
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Last modified: March, 12, 2019