My Maxtor 45 HD is making a clicking sound & won't boot. Is it fatal?

[nexialist]

Scan disk discovered a bad spot on the HD and proceeded to do a surface scan.

I interrupted and instead went to Norton Disk doctor to do the same thing. Norton fixed 1 bad spot after I gave the ok to "mark" (as not usable).

When I gave the OK to "mark" a 2nd bad spot it got stuck there and would not continue, and then the HD began to make a clicking noise.

The HD is under warranty (6 mo old) I can replace all the data except for about 2000 Napster tunes.

Any hop for recovery?

Dan

 

[Paulson]

Nope.

It has the click of death.

Sorry....

 

[SpeedTrap]

get a dift drive in there or pull it and see if you can copy over otherwise its gone

 

[Bleep]

Here is a old trick that might work. Get another drive ready for a backup take the old drive loose that is out of the case but still hooked up hold the drive in your right hand with the circuit board up boot the machine and right away give the drive a hard flip (dont let go) in the direction away from your body, this might get it going again, try this a couple of times nothing to loose. if it boots make the backup before shutting down as it may never get going again.
Bleep

 

[rawko]

sir, we're going to have to operate

 

[nexialist]

Yea Rawco,

I am thinking about taking the top off to see if I can stop that clicking is but that would void the warranty.

Thanks Bleep,

I'm gonna try that "shock" treatment. What the hell. If it boots I can xcopy my Napster tunes, email, and mydocuments.

 

[AlexMc]

Whatever you do don't open the drive if it's under warranty. It's unlikely that you'll be able to fix anything inside anyway and your warranty will be history. Are your tunes really worth the risk

 

[jamarno]

Bleep,

The flip trick used to help with old drives that suffered from heads sticking to their ultra-smooth platters and lubricant, but drive makers learned to intentionally roughen up the platters in the head landing zone to prevent such stiction trouble. So any start-up problem caused by friction is now a sign that the motor has a bad oil or a motor driver chip has a bad transistor.

 

[rawko]

I wouldn't recommend taking off the top. The second you do your going to introduce dust into it and it'll have bad sector galore. The dust will scratch the platters. Just rma it.

 

[BadThad]

This is really cool, it will help you identify the problem:

Drive Clicking Sounds