Well I was just on totse browsing the forums, when my tower started making noises , a patterned hard click, and then my computer froze. No blue screen. I turned it off. Turned it omn, clicks, and then it said smtg like "boot failure, please insert disk". I dont know what it is.

If I am fucked, please, just tell me, can I recover all my data????

please help. thats all the info i have.

-what is wrong

-how can I fix it?

thanks


btw, im on a different computer right now, and also, with the computer that got fucked up, I took off the side of the tower and turned it on, the clicking is coming from my hard drive. But (i wish you could hear) the clicking isnt the "normal" clicking you hear, its a more softer "thumpier" click. every like 2 or 3 seconds it will do that.

That clicking sound is the sound of the r/w heads on the drive slamming about. It also means that the drive will never work again. I've heard that if you freeze such a drive (Like, in the freezer) then sometimes you can get them to work again for short periods. Take proper care if you're gonna do that.

Were I you, I'd say, forget about that old data.

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so what, I unscrew the bolts, un plug the wire, and stick in in the freezer for an hour?

also... I NEED that data. I NEED it. There has GOT to be a way to save/recover it.

As toraton said, that's the heads flying around.

There's a chance it may be the logic board which is fried, in which case if the data is REALLY important you can buy another of the same drive and swap the boards over.

I personally haven't had the freezer trick work for me but you could give it a go. All you do it freeze that bugger for a couple hours, then plug it back into your PC really really quick. When it starts to play up again, it's time for another freeze.

Back up next time?

I've never even heard of freezing a drive. are your sure youre not messing with me?

why would it just all of a sudden, randomly, when im using it, decide to break?

Hehe we're not messing with you - it really is supposed to work. Google "freeze hard drive" and have a read.

Hard drives have a thing called MTBF, that is Mean-Time Between Failures. It's common knowledge that hard drives don't last forever, and you should never count on one lasting forever. I've had drives that have lived two years and drives that have been going for eight now, it's all luck past a certain point.

We're not kidding with you, or trying to get you to break your shit or anything, that's not what we do here. You could try swapping the logic boards, or try the fabled "platter swap", but I doubt those things will work.

If you wanna give it a go though, buy the exact same model of hard drive and swap the logic boards out. If that doesn't work, you could open the drive and swap the platters from the old drive into the new drive and supposedly some people have had this work (but there's really no way it should; the data should be beyond repair after opening the drive and touching the platters).

Sorry, but you don't have a whole lot of options. In the future, I'd advise frequent backups or a RAID1 for crucial data.

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ok. I just want to know. Is there ANY way at all to just save/recover my data?

I think I just provided you with some choices.

Try freezing the drive.
Try swapping the logic boards for the same model.
Try swapping the platters for the same model (though this shoudn't work).

Your drive is dead, you waited too long. Keep current backups of important data.

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Those are the three things which you could do. There is the option of sending it to a data recovery company which would almost certainly get the data back but at a big, big, cost.