The drive had been out of action for years before it was boxed up for a move from Wavertree to Maghull, and it came out of the van with a new noise. It continually clicks, and now it rattles a little, the owner wrote, hoping the rattle was something non-essential. It was. The clicking was the part that mattered, and it had been there long before the removal van.
| Media | An older Samsung external drive that clicks continuously without ever presenting itself, and that acquired a rattle after being knocked during a house move. |
| What was reported | Samsung external drive, out of use for several years, clicks continuously with nothing appearing on the machine, knocked during a house move and now rattling, data still wanted. |
| Fault class | Mechanical, on two counts. A head fault produced the clicking, and the knock in the move shook a mounting screw loose inside the case, which produced the rattle. Both were dealt with in the same clean-air operation. |
| On the bench | Not powered further. Profiled on a current-limited bench supply with the click pattern and the rattle characterised, opened in clean air under laminar flow, heads and platters inspected under a stereo microscope, the loose screw located and removed, matched donor heads fitted and alignment set, imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA, files located in R-Studio and validated. |
Clicking is the sound of heads trying and failing. The drive spins up, the heads go looking for the servo pattern that tells them where they are, they cannot find it, and they reset and try again. That reset is the click. A drive doing that cannot describe itself to the machine, which is why nothing appears when it is plugged in.
The rattle and the clicking were not the same fault. The clicking predates the move by years. The rattle arrived with it. A rattle that starts after a knock is nearly always loose hardware inside the case, a screw or a mount that has been shaken free, and that is a separate and much smaller problem than anything happening to the platters.
His instinct about the rattle was sound. He guessed a non-essential component and he was right. A loose screw is not something the drive needs in order to be read. It is something that has to come out before the drive is spun again, because a loose object over a platter is a hazard, but it is not a reason to write the data off.
Years of sitting idle cost nothing. Magnetic domains on a platter do not fade on the shelf on any timescale that matters to a household. The drive was as recoverable in the new house as it had been in the old one.
It was not run further. On a current-limited bench supply the click pattern was characterised and the rattle located roughly by orientation, which suggested loose hardware rather than anything moving on the spindle. It was opened in clean air under laminar flow.
The loose screw was found clear of the platter surface and removed first, before anything was allowed to turn. The head stack was inspected under the stereo microscope and the platters checked for scoring, which they did not show. Matched donor heads were fitted, alignment was set, and the drive was imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA. Files were located in R-Studio from the image and validated.
The screw came out, the heads went in, the drive imaged and the files came back. The rattle turned out to be the least interesting thing about the job, which was more or less what the owner had hoped.
One drive, £300 + VAT, with 50% of that payable before the work began because the drive had to be opened. Mechanical work sits outside no fix, no fee, and the balance was due only once the recovered files had been checked.
A clicking drive should be unplugged and left unplugged. Every extra spin-up drags heads that cannot read across a surface that is currently fine, and that is how a straightforward job turns into a difficult one. If it has also started rattling, that is a second reason not to power it: something loose inside a spinning drive can reach the platters. Neither noise means your data has gone. Both mean the case has to come off in clean air, which is bench work, not kitchen table work. Pack it so it cannot move in the box and post it in.
Every case file here is written up from a real enquiry handled for households and businesses across Liverpool, Merseyside and the wider North West, anonymised so that nobody is identifiable. Each one gives the reasoning behind the diagnosis, the method the fault actually called for, and the equipment it was worked on.
A large drive that will not register has a firmware, board or mechanical cause, and only a direct read separates them
Write errors are an early warning, and the right response is one careful image, not weeks of retries
A drive that has been taken out of a machine is read on its own, whatever it was doing while it was still in one
The diagnostic is free and takes 2 working days from arrival, the figure is fixed in writing, and logical faults run on no fix, no fee. Start online or ring the freephone.