A clicking drive is not asking for another go. The heads are failing to find the reference track they steer by, resetting, and failing again, and each of those attempts is made a few nanometres above the surface your files are written on. The one useful thing you can do is take the power off.
Mechanical work: £300 + VAT for one drive, with 50% taken as a deposit. Clicking drives sit outside no fix, no fee, because donor heads are bought in for your drive and nobody gets them back. The diagnostic is still free.
Drives in trouble make a small number of distinct sounds, and telling them apart is worth doing before anything gets plugged in again. Only one of the six below justifies a second attempt at power.
The head assembly is sweeping across to find the servo information it steers by, failing to read it, retracting to the parking ramp and setting off again. That loop repeats until the drive gives up or somebody pulls the power. It is the classic sound of head damage, and it is the one that gets worse the longer it runs.
The drive runs the same recalibration and then resets itself completely. Corrupted firmware in the service area produces this as readily as a broken head does, and so does a board that cannot hold the motor at speed. It is not something anybody can diagnose from across a room, which is what the free diagnostic is for.
A laptop off a desk, or an external pulled onto a hard floor by its own cable, can park the heads badly or leave one resting on the surface. The damage from the fall itself is usually survivable. The damage done by the next twenty minutes of running very often is not.
Listen for the motor. Where there is no rising whirr under the tick, the spindle may be seized or the board may not be delivering enough current to start it. Bearings that have stuck after years in a warm cupboard are a real category of fault, and forcing one is how platters end up scored.
A 2.5 inch external that is short of power ticks in a way that sounds mechanical and is not. This one is worth a single attempt on a rear port of a desktop, or through a mains-powered hub, using the cable it came with. If it still ticks, that was the one try you had.
Beeping normally means the motor is trying to turn and cannot. A rising whine can be a bearing on the way out. Neither improves with running time and neither can be persuaded at a desk, so both are opened on the bench instead.
Inside a sealed drive the read heads fly on a cushion of air a few nanometres above platters turning at 5,400 or 7,200 revolutions a minute. They know where they are because servo information was written into the surface at manufacture, and the drive reads it continuously in order to steer. When a head cannot read that information, the firmware has one response available: pull the arm back to a known position and begin the approach again. That reset is the sound you can hear. The click is not the failure itself. The click is the recovery attempt, made several times a second, for as long as there is power on the drive.
Most often a head has been damaged, by shock, by age or by contact with the platter, and a damaged head reads nothing useful anywhere on the disk. Sometimes the platters are turning slowly or not at all, because a bearing has seized or the motor driver on the board has failed, and heads cannot fly on a cushion of air that is not being generated. Occasionally the mechanics are perfect and the fault is entirely electronic, since a board that cannot supply the motor makes a healthy drive sound broken. Through a plastic case all three are indistinguishable, and only one of them is cheap to put right.
A damaged head does not hover politely above the surface waiting to be replaced. It makes contact, and where it makes contact it lifts particles of magnetic coating that then circulate inside the sealed chamber and get dragged under the remaining heads. That is how a drive with one bad head and five good ones becomes a drive with six bad heads and a ring of scoring around the platter. Data on a scored track is not recoverable by anybody, at any price, with any equipment in existence. This is the entire reason the instruction here is so blunt: power off, unplug, leave it off until it is on a bench.
The freezer story has been circulating since disks were measured in megabytes, and it survives because somebody once remembered a drive copying for forty seconds after coming out of a bag. What it does reliably is put moisture inside a mechanism built to tolerances finer than a fingerprint. Condensation forms on cold platters the instant they meet room air, the heads then meet water where they expected a film of air, and a disk that needed a head transplant now needs its platters cleaned as well. Cooling also shrinks metal that was machined to fit at operating temperature. If a freezer ever bought anyone a few seconds, it took the rest of the disk as payment.
The other standing piece of internet advice is to give the drive a sharp knock to free the heads. On the small number of disks where heads have genuinely stuck to the surface, a knock does not release them cleanly. It drags them, and it takes coating with them. On every other clicking drive, which is the overwhelming majority, a knock adds mechanical shock to an assembly that is already out of alignment. Standing it on end, spinning it in your hand and rapping it on a desk are all versions of the same gamble, played with the only copy of the data.
The drive is opened in filtered air and the head stack is examined under magnification. Where it is damaged it is replaced from a matched donor, meaning the same model, the same firmware family and frequently the same production batch. The platters are never touched by hand and never wiped. Once the drive reads again nothing is repaired in the ordinary sense: the disk is imaged sector by sector onto a hardware imager, weak regions are mapped and revisited at the end rather than hammered at when they are found, and every file that comes back is extracted from that image rather than from your disk. If a replacement head fails during imaging, and on a bad drive it can, another donor set goes in and the image carries on from where it stopped. The hard drive recovery page covers the rest of the mechanical work.
One drive is £300 + VAT whether the work turns out to be a head transplant or a ten-minute logical fix. Clicking is mechanical, so 50% of that figure is taken up front and the job sits outside the guarantee. The network wording does not vary: No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Working out which of the three faults you actually have costs nothing, and that diagnostic closes 2 working days after the drive arrives, never faster. Post it to Guildford Data Recovery, Building 2, Ground Floor, Guildford Business Park, Guildford GU2 8XH, packed so that nothing shifts inside the box, and take the drive out of the laptop, tower or case first. From Bracknell that is roughly 40 minutes down the A322 and the A3, and reception takes drop-offs in office hours. Nobody collects, from anywhere, and there is no Bracknell counter.
Power it down, leave it alone, and let the diagnostic work out what the noise is. The figure is fixed before anything is opened.
Almost every drive on this bench arrived in a padded box. Tracked post is the gentlest way to move a disk that is already in trouble, and a parcel handed in around Bracknell is usually in Guildford the next working day.
Is the storage still bolted into a machine — laptop, tower, iMac, MacBook, rack server, a DVR under the till? Free it first and send the bare unit. Stripping hardware is not something this lab does, though it is ten minutes' work for any repair shop on your high street. There is a single case with no way round it: memory chips soldered flat onto the mainboard, which is how Apple Silicon machines and certain ultrabooks are built. Where the storage cannot be unbolted, there is no parcel to make up.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
The name on the parcel wants to be Guildford Data Recovery. Driving it over from Bracknell is roughly forty minutes on the A322 then the A3; posting it costs you a stamp and a day. Either way, a message goes out to you as soon as it is logged onto the system, and two working days later the diagnostic is finished.
Unsure whether something should go in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 while the lid is still open, or work through the free online diagnostic and let it tell you.