Hard Drive "Click of Death"...Can Data be Recovered?

[tootallll]

A friend has a laptop hard drive that is making the "Click of Death" and not booting. He put it in a USB external enclosure and tried to access it without success. Can the data be recovered for less than the $700 recovery fee someone wanted to charge him?
Thanks!
Mike

[[Admin] danroth]

This probably won't be much help, but $700 is a fairly low recovery fee.

[Josh Scott]

I have been told by several people if you take it and put the hard drive in a zip lock bag and place it in a freezer you can sometimes get it to run long enough to pull information off of it. This only works with certain kinds of failures can't remember which ones, make sure you put it in a zip lock bag it's not good if you get freezer burn on your hard drive. I have been told by friend he has done it and it worked. He put it in an external hard drive case and put ice around it while he was using it. Here is a link to an article about it
http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/200...over-data.html

[kbob]

from past experience, typically the "click of death' failures are when the internal drive controller itself has failed, and no freezing will help once it actually goes out-when it's starting to fail, maybe, but not after. The only successful recovery I've heard of that actually working for post failure was on a flash drive...

for the hard drive in question, what we had to do for a raid failure at work once was to buy IDENTICAL hard drives-same make, same model, same batch numbers-for both drives, remove the controllers (in a clean, dry static free environment, etc) and replace the failed ones in the old broken down drives. Those repaired drives still work today, over 3 years later.

Typically, you'll pay more for matching the older drives than you would for much larger new ones-but for us, it would have taken over two months of typing to replicate the entire database, or maybe two weeks to redo from the latest non-failed backup. Seems the drives had had errors on the backups, but nobody checked them after their nightly backups (no, wasn't the tech guy for work...whew-and I'd recommended having swapped external drives and using the swapped drive to off-site backup the database at my boss's home office-something they of course now do).

It took a little over a week to find, order, and transfer the electronics using our local pc guru, and it was well worth it. I think it cost us around $300 for the drives and his time. Likely, if that hadn't worked we would just have recreated the data, because our data recovery (with the raid and dual drives et al) was qouted at over $2000.

[wvpv]

I've actually recovered 3GB of data from a click-dead hard drive after freezing it.

I wrote about it here.

There's also another CMN thread about that here.

[wvpv]

Also, here's a good resource for diagnosing hard drive failures.

[stevegoad]

I know Kim Komando (not the greatest source, but a very good one) has mentioned the freezing method more than once on her show.

[Lucas]

I've used the freeze method a few times, it's also failed on me a few times as well.

[shayward]

Any data can be recovered... it's just a matter of the cost. They recovered the majority of the data from a hard drive that was on the Columbia Spaceshuttle.

[tootallll]

Thanks all for your replies...good stuff...I'll pass this info along.
Mike.

[davison1]

There may be a chance that sometimes we may get our data by simply freezing the crashed hard drive. But in my opinion there a specific data recovery software can do the job in much better way. You can try the free downloads of such software like me. I downloaded the free stellar phoenix windows data recovery and recovered my media files from crashed hard disk

You can also try some other free data recovery software

All the best