I had a 20gb Western Digital hdd that was 14 months old. A couple of weeks ago it starting making unhealthy sounding loud clicking noises, sometimes preceeded by quiet high-pitched whining noises. The frequency of the clicking noises increased over a period of a week. It sounded like something was catching or tripping inside the drive. Whenever the clicking sound was being made it would pretty much hang the system. When the clicking got pretty much constant, I managed to back up 400mb of work files onto another hdd, and the next time I booted, the system didn't even start. The HDD is no longer being recognised in the system's BIOS, or in the BIOS of another computer it has been tried on. I have also tried swapping the IDE cable, but that didn't help, and I've bought a new drive that is working fine on the same cable position anyway. What I want to do now is try to get as much of the rest of the data off the drive as I can, and I'm open to any type of suggestion... any unorthodox tricks for getting drives working that one last time. When I power on the system with the failed hdd in, it does spin up and makes one sound like it is trying to read from the drive, but that is as far as it gets. It continues to spin as long as the system is on, but the system cannot recognise it at all. This is 14 months worth of data, all unreachable, and I can't really afford to send the drive off to a professional data recovery service, so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Richard

There are expensive outfits around who can (so they claim) recover data off a dead/grunched HD; but they do cost...

Not sure if it will work in your case since it seems you are having hardware failure and not software like an accidental fdisk, but try OnTracks EasyRecovery. It saved my ass just last night when a partition dissappeared along with 15gigs of data. I got all of it back. The problem you may be having, however, sounds like crashed heads or some other mechanical failure. You may have scratching of the platters or the heads may be busted and not even move, if the latter then you are really screwed unless you want to shell out $75/hr to have your data professionally recovered. The first time you heard the sound you should have turned of your computer until you decided upon a recovery option, like buying a new hardrive and copying the old ones contents immediately or taking it to a professional. Regardless you've just experienced the single most important reason for backing up your data.

This may sound crazy, but I know a couple of things people have tried when the hard drive is clicking and trying to go bad. 1st guy would put the hard drive in the freezer for a while for it to get cold. He said it has worked because the temperature does something to the drive. The 2nd guy would put the hard drive between 2 dictionaries or phone books and drop it on the floor. He claimed this has worked for him. No guarantees. Good Luck.