Here at the New Blood hard drive repair service, we have heard this call over and over again.
“I hear you do hard drive repair when a hard drive stops working, well recently my hard drive stopped working and I’m wondering if you can help me. When I turn my hard drive on, I hear a clicking sound and then a beep. It repeats this over and over for a few times and then stops. I do not have a back-up of my data and I have tons of irriplacable photos on their I desprarately need back! Can you help?”
Before we answer your question, can I first direct you to my preferred method of backup? It is backing up through the cloud.
First of all, there is no easy answer to this question. As you know, the inner-working of a hard drive are complex in nature. If they weren’t, we would all be repairing our own hard drives and rarely experience total loss of data.
We all think we are immune to a hard drive failure. We buy a number of external hard drives to ensure that we are storing too much valuable content in one area. Instead of helping the problem, we are only exacerbating it by forcing more and more advanced methods of backup. All it takes is a careless step and one of these external hard drives to fall a little to hard on the ground, causing the entire hard drive to be unreadable.
There are so many stories of people even sending their hard drives in to the manufacturer and not being able to get their data recovered.
At the same time, very few of us work for Nasa or have a large budget to spend on sending our hard drives away for repair when the starting rate is upwards of $5,000. I know your photos are valuable to you, but who of us has that kind of budget sitting around to even afford that?
Clicking Sound and a Beep
When your hard drive is singing the dreadfull tune of a clicking sound and then beeping, you are very limited on what you can do to recover your data. This sound indicates there is something wrong with your read/write head within your hard drive.
Changing the Read/Write Actuator Arm or Head on Your Own
If you are feeling adventurous and want to give and attempt at fixing your hard drive on your own (we do not recommend this), here is a nice demo video showing the process.
Please note that you will want to make sure:
- You have the right tools.
- You are the type of person that uses extreme caution when performing such tasks
- You are sturdy with your hands. You usually only get one shot to replace the read-write head of the hard drive, and a failed attempt could mean that you will have no shot at recovering your lost data.
- You are able to find a correct replacement part. Often hard drives even of the same brand and model will change their parts from revision to revision. It can be very common to order your replacement part and find that it does not fit correctly.
See common mistakes of replacing your read/write head on your own.
Ordering your Replacement Part
There are two difficult steps in fixing a read/write head failure. The second difficult step is performing the replacement. The first is locating an exact replacement part. The recommended way of doing this is to order an exact duplicate hard drive simply for its parts and then exchanging the working read write arm with the faulty one.
Locating an exact hard drive is sometimes difficult though. We have seen so many times that individuals will try to replace a part which looks very close to the faulty part, but in fact is greatly different. It takes a descerning eye and careful precision to make sure that you are not caught in this scenario.
Final Thoughts
Learn from this experience right away. Get a new form of backup. We highly recommend the cloud.
Get your HD to an expert is you are not comfortable taking on the risk of repairing your hard drive and possibly ruining your data forever. Failed hard drives sent to newblood with the clicking and beeping sound prior to getting worked on elsewhere see greater than 50% chance of recovery. Hard drive sent after they have been worked on at home or by a non-professional have less than 5% chance of getting their data recovered by our team.
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