The click is the head assembly retracting to its parking ramp, recalibrating, and swinging back out to try again — over and over. It is a loop, not a one-off failure, and every cycle costs you something. Power it down before reading the rest of this.
The drive cannot lock onto its servo information, so it retracts the heads and attempts it again. Where the heads are damaged, each of those passes takes them back across the surface holding your data.
A clicking drive is telling you something precise. The read heads cannot locate their servo data — the positioning information written across the platter that tells them where they are. Unable to find it, the actuator retracts to its stop and tries again, and that retract is the click you hear.
It repeats because the drive keeps trying. Every cycle loads the heads onto a surface they may already be contacting, and on a drive where contact is occurring, each pass removes a little more of the magnetic coating your data is written on.
This is why the advice is always the same and always urgent: switch it off. Not after finishing what you were doing. Now.
Everything else about this recovery was decided by the fault. This part is decided by you, and it affects the outcome more than anything done afterwards.
A drive switched off at the first noise usually recovers substantially complete. One that ran for a fortnight while somebody hoped it would settle frequently comes back partial, because scored platter has no repair — the coating that held that data is physically gone.
There is no technique, no laboratory and no price that restores a scored surface. That is the one genuinely irreversible outcome in this work, and it is almost always self-inflicted after the fact rather than caused by the original failure.
No, the same fault. The drive attempts to initialise, fails and gives up rather than retrying continuously. The heads have still made contact.
Please do not. Scanning keeps a failing drive powered and seeking for hours, which is exactly the load that turns a partial fault into a total one.
No. It is thirty-year-old advice from an era of different engineering, and on a modern drive it introduces condensation into a sealed assembly with sub-micron head clearances. It has ended recoveries that would have been routine.
No. A drive fitted with donor parts is a vehicle for reading data off once. It is not a disk to trust again, and anyone offering that is describing something that does not exist.
Depends almost entirely on how long it ran after the first click. You get an honest estimate at the free diagnostic rather than afterwards.
From £300 +VAT for mechanical work, with a 50% deposit because clean-air time and donor parts commit at the start.