Have you ever heard a PC’s “Click of Death”? Then you must be a lucky lad! They are nothing but the clicking sounds made by Zip and Jaz drives when they begin to fail. The sounds are heard when the disks are inserted or when they are spinning in the drives. This clearly indicates your hard drive is going to die.
If you are diligent, you would have made full backups of your data. If that is not the case means, act fast!
What Should I Do Then?
Simple. Buy or borrow an external drive, plug it in, and copy all your critical and important data. You have to offload everything you can and install a new drive before the old one dies.
If your hard drive is in extreme critical stage, then you won’t be able to boot Windows. Therefore, running any file-copy operations becomes impossible. Then you can try Linux-Based boot CD. I recommend Ultimate Boot CD. This will help.
After downloading the file, burn it to a CD and run the Linux OS straight from the disc. It gives you access to your drive without running Windows. Now you can easily offload all your files before your hard drive kicks the bucket.
What To Do If Everything Else Fails?
If everything fails then you have no choice but to seek professional help, which will, of course make your wallet lighter. Seek out a professional data recovery service. Be prepared to spend some bucks for the rescue.
Its better to take a regular backup of your data, sometimes back i lost all my data due to hard drive crashed.The software is used doesn’t recovery all my data, then i go for data recovery services, they recovered all my data.
Prevention is better than cure…
so we can keep our harddrive in a good condition
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Nice buddy !! thanks for sharing !!!
Data recovery is very expensive now a days, so its hard to find reliable freeware to recover data, image or HDD. Thanks, good article mate, cheers.
Yea I usually try to work it out myself, unless the problem is way over my head. The pros just cost too much for my wallet. Although if/when I do mess up the motherboard tinkering around in there I might reconsider lol.
i think if it all failed seeking professional help costs a lot as 500 dollars
Recently my PC started making weird noises, and came to know that it is at the verge of dying and took almost all important backups on cheap DVD available on market…
yeah waiting for my hard disk to kick the bucket any idea on which hard disk is the best?
I had earlier blogged on 5 data recovery tools which work in a formidable manner.
But, I do not suppose it can bring back the info after the hard drive crashes permanently and an obituary is set.
helpful for those in a time of need-just get RAID norton ghost and have done with all the issues.
If you think your harddisk is dead and there is precious data on it, I would suggest Spinrite. It is a miracle software.
Thanks Pallab for ” spinrite “.
a stitch in time, saves 9! [Backup now!]
i like making timely backups because if the hard drive really fails beyond repair, the professionals also could do little… that is to say, the professionals you will find around 😮 however if you are really keen to pay the real data recovery companies who will open up your hard disk completely under lab conditions, that is in vacuum conditions, then you would need something more than a wallet to pay 😀
I have heard that keeping the Hard Drive in the freezer overnight (In Zip Pouch) and then trying to run it at times makes the recovery possible as sometimes due to low temperature the headers align themselves again.
This can be tried as there is nothing to loose as even the Hard Disk is dead otherwise.
Long months back, I lost nearly 15gb valuable data. If I now this trick, I would be in safe.
External is much better Idea, I hardly trust any data recovery software.
Hmmm but if you are having a recovery floppy disk before the HD fails then you can access the data easily and take a complete look over it [Smart way 🙂 ]
another way it organizing your hard disk. Scan it for bad sectors defragment as u got time it increase the life of a hard drive Its my personal experience and definitively work with others too
maybe u r right Gurpreet, but for me that didn’t work either… I regularly defragment my HD and check for bad sectors. but at all times, my HD went dead almost instantly like u can say in seconds.. just like a HD heart attack 😉
the last one failed while my pc was on !! Suddenly the pc rebooted and said ‘cannot find boot media’. 🙁
I just don’t trust HDs now… will have to search for some new technology 😉
have been a victim of HD crashes for 3 times in 5 years… the last one was in this october and that too it was filled upto the edge, 71/76 gigs !!
btw, all the times it has been that same sound and same type of HD death.. 🙁
does anyone know about some utility using which I can recover the data from this dead HD…
thanks..
hi Pradeep,
external drive is a good point you mentioned…This will keep our data safe. As ramkumar says we can also try for some data recovery softwares..whats your idea about that?
Dude wat about using some Data Recovery Softwares. Can they help in the worst case scenario?
regarding the data recovery sfwrs (DRS), I think that may work if you could connect the dead HD making it a slave.. I haven’t tried it though…
The main question for this to be successful is, will ur slave HD be detected ?? coz if it doesn’t get detected I don’t think the DRSs could do anything.. 🙁
Well it has a good percentage of success rate for my friends over the past few years. I have tried to recover data from an SD card and it worked.
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