Hard drive advice
Your hard drive is clicking. What should you do first?
If a hard drive starts clicking, stop using it. Repeated power cycles, scanning attempts, and recovery software can make a physically failing drive harder to recover.
What not to do
Do not turn a bad situation into a worse one.
- Do not keep rebooting and reconnecting the drive.
- Do not run recovery software on a drive making new sounds.
- Do not open the drive yourself.
- Do not keep copying files until it dies completely.
When to call immediately
- The clicking is new
- The data is business-critical
- The drive was dropped
- The device is no longer detected reliably
Need help now?
Clicking hard drives should be handled carefully.
If the data matters, get advice before doing anything that stresses the drive further.