Method To Save A Hard Drive That’s About To Die

If you’ve been using computers long enough, you have probably encountered the click-whirr-click noise a hard drive makes indicating it’s about to cease functioning.

However, there is a way to save it. This is a long and time consuming process, but yes it can be saved. At least for a little while.

If you have a hard drive that is just starting to make that click-whirr-click noise, the first step should be to immediately image the drive. The complete instructions on how to do this are here.

After this the process is actually quite simple. Pop in your Windows CD, start the Windows installation process, choose to erase the hard drive and perform a STANDARD format, meaning not “quick format”.

This process will take time. Possibly a long time. During the format you will hear the clicking noises, however this is okay because all bad sectors will be marked as unusable. This is good because the bad parts of the drive will no longer be accessible and therefore avoid the read errors (that’s where the clicking comes from). When the format completes, reboot with the CD in the drive and perform a standard format again. The second time should go much quicker than the first.

When you’re all done, you should be able to still use your hard drive for a while. This is not guaranteed, but it’s better than having a dead drive.

I have personally done this on my old Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop several times. When I hear the click, I image the drive, pop in the recovery CD and “slow”-format twice. Then I push the image back.

Why do I bother doing this? Because 2.5-inch laptop-size hard drives are expensive and there isn’t anything on the laptop I would miss were it lost due to a dead drive.

An 80GB (the smallest available, I have a 60GB) Western Digital 2.5-inch is $40 new. My laptop is barely worth $100 in its current condition as it is beat up. Being that I don’t want to spend cash for a hard drive that’s almost worth half the cost of the entire laptop, I stretch the life of the existing drive as much as I possibly can. And if that means imaging/formatting every few months, that’s fine because it saves me money.