


Concentric rings on the platter’s surface had been gouged out by the mangled read/write head. This is the severe hard drive malady we refer to as “ rotational scoring”.īut the other surfaces of the platters had no visible damage, so our engineers weren’t about to write this case off as a loss. Of the two platters inside this clicking Western Digital hard drive, the top surface of the topmost platter had suffered severely. When our cleanroom engineers examined this hard drive, we found ourselves looking at a dire data recovery situation. When read/write heads fail, some fail more severely than others-which can lead to one platter surface sustaining heavier damage than its neighbors. Most hard drives have multiple platters, writing data to both sides of each. Scratched Platter Data Recovery ServicesĬlicking Western Digital Hard Drive Recovery: WD My Passport Not RecognizedĪll of the data on your hard drive lives on the surfaces of the hard disk platters within the drive.Recovery Attempt on Clicking Seagate Hard Drive.Toshiba Hard Drive Making a Clicking Noise.And in the following case study, that was exactly what our data recovery engineers would have to do in the safe haven of our lab’s cleanroom workstations. When a hard drive starts clicking, the damage to the read/write heads can be mild, moderate, or severe, but there’s no way to tell how bad the situation is without removing the drive’s faceplate and taking a peek at its platters. This noise does not bode well for the hard drive-computer repair professionals call it the “ Click of Death” for a reason. As the failed read/write heads blindly sweep over the platters and return to their starting position over and over again, they produce a rhythmic and repetitive clicking noise. When a hard drive’s read/write heads fail, though, they produce an altogether nastier clicking noise. This is the sound of the read/write heads moving up the ramp that guides them into place over the data storage platters. Clicking Western Digital My Passport Not Recognized – The Dreaded “Click of Death”Ī healthy hard drive clicks once upon starting up.
