Clicking hard drives are hard drives which display certain problems. Some occurrences may be: Hard drive clicking on startup, head crashing on the hard drive platters, damaged system area. If you hear any signs of clicking, stop using the hard drive right away or you may cause more damage and make the files impossible to recover.
Whenever a clicking hard drive freezes, a dropped hard drive is clicking, or the clicking hard drive is not recognized you should immediately stop attempt using the hard drive normally because you will only cause more damage. If you want to try and recover your data from your hard drive you should either check if your computer is at least capable of recognizing the hard drive, or you should take it to a professional specialist immediately. Professional specialists may not only be capable or recovering your data but in some cases can fix the bad hard drive clicking.
If you try to recover your hard drive yourself, you should plug it in in a computer with another hard drive and Windows installed so that you can use that hard drive as work base. You will want to use the clicking hard drive as little as possible so to not overwrite any data in it or make the problem even worse, otherwise you may not be able to recover the data anymore. Once you have the computer prepared you should get a program to do a sector scan of the clicking hard drive so that it finds all your files including the ones you can"t access and recover them to your main hard drive.
Usually you can recover most data before the hard drive fails, but, if you are unsure how to do every step of the data recovery you should take the hard drive to a professional specialist. He will be able most of the time to not only recover all of your data safely, but he may also be able to fix the hard drive to stop clicking and suffer any more damage, allowing you to use the hard drive till the end of its life. But you should always consider have a spare backup drive so that you can recover the data more quickly and be sure you don"t lose as much of it if it is the case.
One of the causes of clicking hard drives is rough handling. Dropping hard drives or the laptop even, sometimes a more violent hit to the computer tower, it can all suffice to cause damage, because while hard drives are meant to handle some punishment without damage, they were not meant to be dropped on the floor. In case of some more violent force affects the hard drive you should immediately see if it"s starting up without doing and clicking sounds or if it"s not freezing up once you get into Windows.
To be more cautious, you can also either do diagnostics to the hard drive to see if it finds any errors, or you can instead take it to a specialist for them to do a in-depth analysis for you. The latter option is advised since the professional will know what to do exactly to assess the condition of your hard drive and it will be able to fix it on the spot if the damage isn"t too serious yet. If you continue to use the hard drive without doing a diagnostic, you should also make a backup of your data just in case, otherwise you may not be able to recover it later.