Hard drive dying, possibly dead

I am reasonably certain the hard drive on my beloved computer is dead, or if not it will be any moment now. When I tried to boot my computer (ironically to do long over-due backups) I heard an ominous regular clicking noise from the the hard drive, and the computer then stopped trying to boot. I pressed the reset button, and the computer once more made it to the hard drive part of the boot sequnce, and then the clicking begun and continued as the boot sequence itself stopped. I pressed and held the power button until the computer shut down, and I have not tried to boot it again since.

I am fairly sure that there's a bad mechanical error with the drive, but I am not sure how to verify that, or how to get it up and running long enough to fish out salvage the data I meant to back up when I tried to boot the computer earlier. The drive is not even close to being under warranty any more.

I'm at a loss here. All help is appreciated.

 

I'd put that drive you have in another computer as a slave and try to retrieve your data that way, hopefully your stuff is in folders which you can quickly copy.

 

I have had a similar situation with my drive.

It would not boot up, so I have purchase another drive and plugged in my
esiting drive into my machine to use as a slave, but when I try to access it, it won't open and says that the drive is unformatted and do I want to format it.

 

Grubenstein, you should start your own thread, but do not format the drive, as you will lose you data.

 

Sadly, the only other computer I have free access to is severely crippled by a failed power supply and dying mother board and has not been used for months. I like the idea of accessing the hard drive by booting from some other device, so I am now thinking of taking the DVD RW from the other dead computer, hook it up, and then boot from a live Linux CD, to try and salvage items that way.

Alternatively, I may end up buying a new hard drive, install XP on it and hook up the clicking hard drive as slave, and do it that way. I'll keep you posted.

 

So far, I have not been very successful in my attempts to access the clicking drive.

I attempted to boot from a live Linux CD, with the intention of copying everything from my dying drive to an external one, that I got earlier today. I failed. The computer boots from the Linux CD only if the primary hard drive is completely disconnected. If I leave it connected the computer insists on attempting to boot from the hard drive. Changing the boot order in the BIOS to make absolutely sure it would boot form the CD first led to the error message "Invalid system disk. Replace disk in boot device and press any key." I tried one of my other Linux CDs, with the same results.

As long as the hard drive is connected at all, the CD/DVD drive is either treated as if it doesn't exist or as if the disc in it is unusable. It boots in other computers, and it boots when the hard drive is disconnected, so I know it works.

And while all this is happening, the hard drive continues with its loud clicking and a couple of times I could have sworn I heard something that sounded like faint screeching noises.

Is this it? Is my hard drive officially dead?

 

Unfortunately, I would have to say the hard drive is almost, if not now defunct.
But , in my efforts with hard drives, over the years, the last resort, other than actually changing the 'cover' , by using another identical hard drive, and putting your inner disk , in it, which is really a specialist job, the last resort, is to put the hard drive in an antistatic bag, inside sime bubblewrap, and putting it in the freezer for several hours (sometimes overnight) , then removing, and connecting up (obviously after unwrapping), can persuade it to run one more time to try to get your data off. No guarantee, but several experts have said they managed, sometimes, to do so.
Another method, was to physically drop the hard drive, in a flat manner onto a hard surface, from 100mm to 150mm , to try to make the arm move inside to activate, but , last resort efforts.
Depends how important the data is - specialist could possibly do it , if you do not try any of these last resort efforts.
Good luck.