The fault · clicking, beeping, grinding
A head that has lost track of its own position backs off to the ramp and tries the whole approach once more, then once more again, crossing the recorded surface on every pass. When the ticking begins your files are usually still there. It is the hundreds of attempts afterwards that wear them away, so the quicker the power comes out, the better this ends.
Tell an engineer what it is doing
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| Symptoms | What is behind it | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| An even tick, once a second, over and over | Servo marks on the platter tell the arm where it is; when it cannot read them it returns to the ramp and starts the whole thing over | Pull the plug |
| A thin, high beep — nearly always a 2.5" portable | Nothing turns. The spindle bearing has seized, or heads that have come to rest on the platter are gripping it | Never shake or tap it |
| A grinding, rasping sound | A head is down on the surface — this is the crash itself | Each second of power costs data |
| A short chirp on every spin-up | It cannot calibrate, often after a knock | Switch off and stop |
| A few clicks, then it goes quiet | The drive gives up and resets itself, then tries again | Disconnect it; end the loop |
| It only clicks on some files | One head is going, or the damage sits in one region | Stop the copy; have it imaged |
Every item gets a case number of its own the day it lands. An engineer then works out what has actually failed and tells you plainly which files have a real chance of coming back and which do not. Only then does a price follow: one figure, fixed, in writing, and it costs you nothing to see it. Nothing is charged until you say yes.
Nothing is switched on until the mechanism and the platters have been examined. Where a clicking drive does have to spin, it spins with somebody watching it, in bursts of a few seconds, never left running.
A wrecked head stack comes out and a matched donor set goes in, a seized spindle is released, and heads stuck flat on the platter are lifted clear without touching the surface. From then on the drive has one job: hand over a full image.
A hardware imager works the drive lightly, skipping past regions that will not read and coming back to the worst of them last, until the copy holds everything the disk still has. All file system repair is done on that copy and nowhere else.
No invoice is raised until the full list of recovered files has sat in front of you and you have said go ahead. Your data comes back on media we buy new, posted at our expense, and the job is not closed here until every file has opened on your own machine.
One instruction matters: switch it off. A head rides a few nanometres over a platter spinning at thousands of revolutions a minute, so once something goes wrong there is no room for it to go right. Of all the noisy drives that reach this bench, what separates a good outcome from a bad one is how quickly somebody got to the plug.
The drive turned up ticking once a second with five years of till records on it. Two donor head stacks and one long, unhurried image later, the accounts were complete and the shop filed its VAT return on time.
Usually it is. Clicking says the heads cannot find their position; it says nothing about the state of the platters. With matched donor parts and a slow, careful image, most of a disk normally comes back. The damage is done by the hours it runs on after the noise starts.
No. It belongs to drive designs that went out of production decades ago. Cool a modern disk and water forms inside it while the metal shrinks, so you have added rust and new mechanical damage to the original fault.
The heads are hunting for servo marks laid down when the drive was built, failing to find them, returning to the ramp and going round again. Bent heads, a dying preamplifier and scratched platters produce much the same sound, and only opening it up tells them apart.
No. Whatever the program does, it does through the same broken heads — so it spends its time ordering up precisely the reads that will kill the drive.
Every extra power-up takes something off a drive that is already going. Leave it switched off and let the free diagnosis say what still reads.