harddrive click of death sound

[twallen]

I have an older 8 gig Maxtor hard drive which is recognized in the bios but gets the "harddrive click of death sound" at startup. Fdisk doesn't recognize it or any of the data recovery software programs that I have tried using on it. The drive spins up okay and the controller board doesn't seem to get hot. Just wondering if there is anything else I can try to access some of the info on it. Nothing critical here, so anything out of my pocket isn't going to happen.

Thanks.

[TwoRails]

I've not had any luck with it, but some have: you can try freezing the drive then try again to get the data off.

[rightcoast]

Here is a pdf I found a while back. I had already heard of freezing it, and of giving it a smack on the bench from about 3 inches off of it or so. I have tried to freeze a few drives (at least 5 or 6) for people that didn't want to send it to an expensive recovery pro. it worked once, but only for about 5 minutes. whacking it on the desk has never worked but hey....no critical data try them out. 200 ideas there in the pdf.
http://www.hddrecovery.com.au/downloads/200ways.pdf

[rightcoast]

one thing that I don't remember is in there or not, a sharp twist. Imagine how you turn the door knob if you someone stealing your car. Fast and hard, like that. I saw my boss get one working that way once, but then again it would spin up, sounds like yours does.

[twallen]

Well, thanks for the help. I tried the freezer thing figuring I had nothing to lose with no luck. The drive is recognized in Windows XP device manager and when I click on populate, it just says it's unreadable. It doesn't show up in Explorer though. I don't really care about the data, I just want to figure out what's wrong with the darn thing........

thanks again.....

[twallen]

So, how come the drive is seen in the bios and Windows device manager, but not by any other programs like the data recovery software or even fdisk? :confused:

[flanzig1]

The bios and the OS looks for the firmware on the drive while the recovery programs are trying to access the drive directly through their software.

[twallen]

So would that mean the controller board on the hard drive was working? Is that where it gets the firmware info?