Chosen Solution

I have dropped the external Seagate backup plus 3 TB drive. I opened it up to see if anything is stuck; Looks like the disk rotation and heads are moving fine, except the noise. Any suggestions? Or is this gone for good? Here is a video: https://youtu.be/hWBjA3D3GYY

It is call “Click death”, the heads move but are not sensing information and move to home to attempt to recalibrate. That is fatal error. One the other hand, the video shows a drive opened up to reveal the platters and the heads, the air filter pops up and out shortly after starting the drive. Opening up the drive should only be done in a clean room environment, the heads are very close to the disc and dust is large enough to damage the heads. If the click death was not enough, removing the case made sure that the drive is bad. About the only thing you can do with it is to demonstrate how a drive works.

Never open a hard drive that you plan on using, unless you’re a professional in a sealed environment. Even then it’s risky. Now that your hard drive has been dropped, damaged, and opened, that drive is a very unreliable. Too unreliable. If the data on it is that important, than you’ll have to send it to a data recovery place, which might charge a pretty penny. But I don’t recommend doing it yourself if your data is important. A word of advice: don’t delete the data off your computer until has been safely transfered to another computer. Hope this helps.

I got an external drive doing the same thing. I looked it up and saw it is the “click of death”. Sure enough, no files can be read or moved during clicking/knocking on this one. I read that and started trying to transfer files. I slapped the top of it. Basically, it starts clicking and then files no longer transfer over to another external drive for backing up. I slap the top of the bad one that is clicking again, and they start transferring after a few seconds to half a minute. It does it again and i slap it again, it starts back up okay again. I’m hoping I get them all transferred before the final breath. It is like 24 gb of stuff. I had wiped it clean and started on it again saving files just a few months ago when it was fine. I just cleaned it up then to create new space. It’s prob ten to 8 years old.