Hard drive failure - advice please

Could anyone tell me what the problem is please
http://youtu.be/hPr99mHMldw

 

Hi,sevep. Welcome to Major Geeks.

Unfortunately, the video showed what's called the "click of death". Was there important data on the drive? You may be able to recover the data by taking the drive to a service center capable of forensics but, it will be very expensive. Sorry.

 

Hi mdonah, and thanks for the welcome
Just needed a second opinion here as looking at other broken drives on youtube etc, I couldn't find a similar example of the reader head movement, which in my video is mainly in the center of the platter. Is that surface damage in the center of the disc btw, this is the first HD I've ever opened so not sure? Fortunately this is not my own drive

 

If the read/write heads had actually come in contact with the platters, then there would have been damage to both the heads and the platters. From what I saw and heard in the video, that's not the case and that's why I mentioned forensics. In this instance, it's the controller circuitry on the drive's pc board that's failed.

Inform whomever owns the drive and tell them it will cost $500 — $800, possibly even more depending on the size of the drive and the amount of data on the drive at one of these places to get the data off of the platters. They go through the drive platter-by-platter in a "clean room".

 

There is another long shot....
Replace the electronics board with one from an identical working drive. If the drive mechanicals are still working (heads did not come loose or hit the platter) this sometimes works.
How do I know? We had two identical cranes with close to identical controls take a voltage spike. One drive failed. Both were older drives. The backups were outdated so I cloned the good drive to a new drive and replaced it. I took the good drive's electronics board and bolted it on the inert drive. I then cloned that drive successfully.