A hard drive making a clicking noise is a head assembly that cannot find the track it needs, resetting itself and going round again. Each click is one more attempt across a surface the heads may already be marking, which is why continued power is actively destructive. There is one useful thing to do, and it is to switch the drive off and leave it off.
Clicking is damage in progress — switch it off now. One drive is £300 + VAT, with 50% of the quoted price upfront on mechanical work. The diagnostic itself costs nothing.
A clicking hard drive is not being awkward. It is a head assembly failing to find its servo track, resetting, and trying again, so every click you count is one more attempt across a surface it may already be marking.
The classic pattern. The head stack sweeps for its servo information, fails to find it, is pulled back to the parking position and released to have another go. The interval you are hearing is the length of a single attempt.
The drive gives up and stops the motor after a set number of failures. That is the firmware protecting the surfaces and it is the nearest thing to good news on this list. It also means nothing further will happen without a bench.
A knock while the platters are turning puts the heads onto the surface. Some drives work for another week and then start; others start immediately. Either way the heads are compromised, and every spin-up after that spreads the damage further.
Portable drives take the most knocks and carry the least protection. The mechanism inside a Seagate, WD or LaCie portable is an ordinary 2.5-inch disk and it fails in the ordinary ways. The enclosure has nothing to do with it once clicking has begun.
When the heads cannot read the service area, the drive never finishes starting and never reports itself to the machine. There is nothing wrong with your cable or your ports. The disk has not got as far as introducing itself.
Worse than clicking, and the response is more urgent rather than less. Grinding suggests sustained contact between head and platter, and platter damage is the one thing no lab can undo. Cut the power to it immediately.
A hard drive clicking is the most recognisable failure noise in computing, and it has an exact mechanical explanation. The heads inside a hard drive fly a fraction of a micron above the platters and are steered by servo information written onto the surface at the factory. Every read begins with a head working out where it is from that servo data. If it cannot, because the head is damaged, because the region it is reading is unreadable, or because the mechanism is not turning properly, the drive abandons that attempt, retracts the head stack to its parking position and starts over. The clicking sound is the arm reaching its end stop. It is a recalibration, repeated for as long as you leave the power on, and it is the drive stating plainly that it cannot read itself.
Head damage is the most frequent by a distance. Heads wear out with age and are destroyed outright when a drive is knocked, dropped or tipped over while running. A seized or stalled spindle motor comes next: the platters never reach speed, servo data cannot be read at the wrong rotational velocity, and the drive clicks its way through the attempt. Bearings stiffened by years of use produce the same result. Third and least obvious, the circuit board can be the culprit. A failing motor driver chip or a damaged power circuit starves the spindle of what it needs, and a mechanically sound disk clicks simply because it never gets up to speed. Only the bench can say which of the three you have, and only after the board is tested or the drive is opened, which is what the free diagnostic exists to establish.
A damaged head is not a passive component sitting quietly out of the way. It is a small piece of hardware a hair above a surface turning at 5,400 or 7,200 revolutions per minute, and when it is broken it makes contact. Each touch takes a little of the magnetic coating with it, which is the layer your data lives in, and the material that comes away circulates inside the sealed chamber and scores other tracks as it travels. Ten minutes of clicking is survivable. An afternoon of somebody plugging it back in every half hour to see whether it feels better is frequently the difference between a complete recovery and a partial one. There is no version of this where more attempts help.
Turn it off now, and do not turn it back on. That single decision, taken early, does more for the outcome than anything else on this page. Every additional spin-up is another pass of damaged heads across the surface holding your files.
The freezer is the durable myth. Chilling a drive briefly changes the tolerances inside it and very occasionally produces one more read, but it also puts condensation onto platters in a chamber engineered to stay dry, and that damage does not reverse. Tapping it, or giving it a firm knock to free the heads, drags damaged heads across the surface under force. Swapping the circuit board with one from an identical drive fails on anything modern, because the adaptive calibration data unique to your mechanism is held in a chip on that board; fit a stranger board and the drive will not read at all, and may write over its own service area attempting to. Software is no use either, since no program can reach a drive that cannot read its own service area to finish starting up. All four are understandable reactions. All four make the bench job harder and some of them make it impossible.
A clicking drive is opened in filtered clean air, because a single ordinary dust particle is larger than the gap the heads fly in. The damaged head stack is removed and replaced with one from a donor drive matched on model, firmware revision and often manufacturing batch, using tools that hold the heads clear of the platters the whole time they are moving. Where the spindle has seized, the platters themselves may have to be transferred to a donor chassis, which is more delicate again because their alignment relative to one another must be preserved exactly. The repaired drive is then imaged straight away in one controlled pass, since a rebuilt mechanism is not expected to last: the object is a complete sector-level copy, and every file returned to you comes off that copy rather than off your disk.
Clicking is mechanical, so the terms want stating clearly before you send anything. The recovery is £300 + VAT for one drive, the same band as any other single disk, and mechanical work takes 50% of the quoted price upfront because donor parts and clean-bench hours are spent whatever the outcome. The published rule reads: no fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. The diagnostic is still free, and no money is mentioned until you are holding the written figure. There is no collection service, so post the bare drive on its own, packed so nothing can shift, to Manchester Data Recovery, Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5AN. That is roughly 35 miles from the city and next working day by tracked post, and the diagnostic closes 2 working days after arrival. Ring 0800 689 0668, Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm if you want to describe the noise to somebody first. A drive that beeps rather than clicks has a different cause and the beeping hard drive page covers it.
Take the power off, box the bare drive, and let the clean bench do the rest. Diagnosis costs nothing.
Nearly everything on this bench arrived by tracked, insured post. It is the calmest way to move a failing drive, and a parcel handed in anywhere on Merseyside is normally on the bench the next working day.
Still screwed inside a laptop, tower, MacBook, iMac, server or a CCTV recorder? Take the drive out and post that on its own. We do not strip machines here, and any computer shop will do it in a few minutes. The one job nobody can take on is flash soldered straight to a logic board, as on Apple Silicon Macs and a handful of very slim laptops: if the storage will not unbolt, there is nothing to send.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Address it to Manchester Data Recovery. It is roughly 35 miles from Liverpool along the M62 if you fancy the run, and next working day by tracked post if you do not. We ring or email the moment it is booked in, and the free diagnostic closes 2 working days after that.
Not sure what belongs in the parcel? Call 0800 689 0668 before you tape it shut, or step through the free online diagnostic first.