It keeps clicking. I can see whats on the drive, but it's very slow and I can't transfer data to my other drives. I can access individual pictures, but it takes a long time. Here's what it looks like when the drive spins:
Guessing the circuit board that controls the seek arm is most probably fritz'd,best bet try to retrieve any data & trash the drive,however there are numerous components to the hdd so it could even be the main board or anything.the platters themselves will still have data intact.those platters mark easily don't touch them
I think you might be right scorpNZ. I'll probably just buy another circuit board online unless anyone has another idea as to what is causing it to malfunction.
it could be any one of whatever components are in the hdd,it'll be electrical part somewhere,there's a small board if i recall i saw in one of my failed drives that controls the seek arm,i never had a spare & didn't bother changing it as like you i tried main board first it didn't work,after that i decided to dump the drive,since then i have more than one drive with mirrored contents,including making free accounts at mega website.Opening the hdd to expose it to air will require a clean dust free room,the drive platters are easily dirtied & the seek arm is real delicate,disturbing the copper wind at the ends will make more than likely make the hdd unreadable
run these data recovery programs as that drive is dying. http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?id=38&sort=0 http://www.ontrack.com/freesoftware/ http://www.z-a-recovery.com/download.htm http://www.snapfiles.com/Freeware/system/fwdatarecovery.html http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/collection/collid,1295-order,1-c,downloads/files.html http://www.easeus.com/ http://www.ntfs.com/products.htm http://www.pcinspector.de/download.asp?language=1#file_recovery http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
