Well Ill start.

I have a laptop that had a Seagate 40gb drive in it. The story is this:

I went back to the UK for eater this year. On our way back we came via Disneyland and me and the wife took about 300 photos throughout.

I arrived home and fired up the laptop, loaded into XP and the it blue screened. I thought thats odd, but nothing unusual as XP can do that sometimes.

Rebooted and it did it again, I heard a little click....thought nothing of it at first then it dawned on me.... the drive was making this noise.

The drive was shafted, not able to spin up. It tried but it clicked when it tried. BUGGER. I managed to recover photos from the memory stick that I used, and about 90% of the photos were OK, and the emails I received whilst I was away... thank god for Ghost

So that is mine, one of a couple but that was the worst.

Cheers
Tongy

in my old laptop the drive started to click, an then died. taking with it a fine music collection.


didnt manage to save it.

Same as Red, I had a mirrored raid using 2 * 200gb Maxtor disks. One of the disks died on the raid card (adaptec) and somehow managed to corrupt the data on the other disk too :/

I kissed goodbye to well over 100gb of music

I always use an external 2.5in drive as a backup against that sort of thing

Although I didnt when the IBMs packed up, not that I lost anything worthwhile.

if you still have it its probably salvagable.

I had clicking hard drives... fixed 2 of them so far using a bit of software, another 2 hard drives to go

Tiz called: Spinrite 6 brilliant stuff it is.

If there clicking surely the reading arm is off the platter?

How does software get by this?

If its really not important but would like to have a go at saving it, just take the top of drive off and gently push the arm back on to the platter. Ive saved loads of drives this way

Worst ive ever had was a windows 2000 install where id forgotten to set the flag in the registry to support greater than 147GB in a single partition.


id gone over the limit and didnt realise,

couldnt get at the new files and then when scandisk started to look at it, it started naffing up all the file indexes  :shock:  :shock:

had to use a tool called getdataback or something along those lines to scan the partition and recover what i could off it onto my other drive.

set the flag in the registry after searching MSs site and reformatted it,
no problems since although i made sure it was set each time ive installed 2000 / xp since

Quote from: GaviNIf there clicking surely the reading arm is off the platter?

How does software get by this?

If its really not important but would like to have a go at saving it, just take the top of drive off and gently push the arm back on to the platter. Ive saved loads of drives this way

Mines "reassigned" sectors and then copied the data back onto the undamaged sectors, apparantly hard drives have extra ones for exactly that reason but no software other than spinrite makes use of them apparantly.

Check out the video files on the site where hes interviewed on techTV.

my old 80gb maxtor has reported doing what youve described m3ta,
(if you use speedfan, check the SMART page online)
 then again i dont use it now days at all