Clicking Hard Drive

[BiPolar]

Hi all! I've got a maxtor 20gb hard drive that just recently started clicking in a repeated rhythmic pattern upon boot. I assume that this is a physical problem with the drive (heads not lining up or something), but want to know what I can use to test this theory. Even if I boot with my other hard disk and the maxtor slaved, it still won't boot up.

Any ideas? Or have I lost all of my data?

[zimv20]

Originally posted by BiPolar
Even if I boot with my other hard disk and the maxtor slaved, it still won't boot up.

what does that mean? do you mean it won't mount?

[cynikal]

try this..

http://www.macpronews.com/macpronews-30-20030716GraniteDigitalSMARTVueforMacOSX.html

it's a hard drive monitoring software.

[stoid]

I bought a new Maxtor drive a while back and it had the exact same problem. The technician said that a ball bearing must have not been sitting properly. If you do get the drive to mount, immediately copy all important data off the drive! This is otherwise known as "the click of death." Good luck, and I hope you don't have anything too vital on there!

[virividox]

back up your data as fast as you can, you can get a drive replicator at frys i think

200-300 dollars it does an exact copy of your hard drive, it might be able to save your data

but like the previous poster said this is the click of death.

[Mal]

There is one remotely possibly temporary solution, if you cannot mount the drive. DiskWarrior has on occasion been able to get those drives to stop clicking for a while and to operate normally. It will pick up again, so I would copy all the data off and get a new drive, but it might let you at least save the data.

JW

[BiPolar]

Thanks. When I boot up with my other hard drive, the clicking one won't mount. However, if I try to boot up with the clicking drive or the clicking drive slaved to the good one, then the ocmputer won't even start. It'll just start the click of death. I"ll try the diskwarrior thing and keep y'all updated.

[BiPolar]

And it looks like DIskWarrior and SmartVUE only work if the drive is able to boot, which it isn't.

[7on]

lol, I've have a drive that's been clicking since 2000. It's back for the days when I built PCs containing 4 hdds with a 250w PSU. Anyhoo, it could fail or it could, mine is suggesting failure as my w2k box is only booting up when it wants to. But is was a nice long run of 4 years :P Thinking of buying a Sawtooth to replace it, which is in fact older than the computer I'm replacing.