What to Do When Your Hard Drive Starts Clicking

The "Click of Death"

If your laptop uses a mechanical Hard Disk Drive (HDD) and you start hearing a rhythmic clicking, ticking, or scratching noise, turn off the laptop immediately. This is commonly known in the IT industry as the "Click of Death."

What Is Actually Happening?

Inside an HDD, there are spinning magnetic platters and a read/write head assembly that hovers microscopic fractions of a millimeter above them. The clicking sound usually means the read/write heads have crashed or the actuator arm is failing to find its track, causing it to repeatedly swing back to the home position and hit the stop bumper.

How We Recover The Data

Mechanical failure recovery requires a cleanroom environment. The drive must be opened in a dust-free enclosure, the damaged head assembly carefully removed, and donor heads from an identical drive installed just long enough to extract the data to a new, healthy drive.