How To: Fix the click of death on a hard drive

This typical hard drive clicking noise means that the System Area (SA) cannot be read. It could be simple or complex to fix.

The System Area is located on the magnetic platters of your hard drive. It is typically on the outside cylinder for a 3.5? hard drive and on the inside cylinder for a 2.5?. This is a very complex area. It is knows as well as Maintenance track, Negative cylinder, Reserved cylinder, Calibration or Initilization area or even Disk ware.

The reason of hard drive making clicking noise because we know the SA cannot be read. You can have 4 main reasons (and a possible combination of them) for this to happen:

Heads are dead
Preamplificator is dead
SA corrupted or scratched
Firmware on the PCB
Whatever you do, you will need to repair the hard drive first.

For heads and preamplificator…well you only have a choice which is to swap the head of your drive. This is where it gets expensive in terms of data recovery services. Head swapping should be done in a white room, but if you are skilled enough you can try it in a clean environnement if you don't plan to spend money anyway on your data. Head issue is very common if you dropped your external hard drive.

If the SA is scratched you might have a shot through a live pcb swap. It will basically bypass the reading of the SA and you have a cheap shot at getting your data back.

Nice and interesting posting! Apart from this i would say something about this issue. Working as an IT Professional, I often have to resolve hard drive faults and failures. One of the common hard drive faults that comes up time and time again is a hard drive clicking sound.

Some causes of hard drive clicking sounds are:

1.The hard drive heads hitting the internal head stop. Often called the Click of Death – Click here for more information.

2.In the case of an external hard drive clicking it may be due to a loose connection, faulty cable or a faulty power adapter – Click here for more information.

3.Some graphics card drivers - Click here for more information.
The hard drive may be on a non-level surface – Click here for more information.
4.Normal hard drive clicking sounds - Click here for more information.
5.Highly fragmented hard drives – Click here for more information.
6.Resolved by updating the hard drive firmware - Click here for more information.
7.Power supply related problems – Click here for more information.
8.Hard drive sharing same power lead as graphics card.
9.Power saving settings.
10.Loose cable connection.
11.Intel storage matrix update.
12.Faulty circuit board on the hard drive.
13.Hard drive platter issues.