All hard drives are prone to suffer from clicking at some point in their life, but, some cheaper manufacturing drives are obviously more prone to this. Hitachi hard drive clicking, Samsung hard drive clicking, these are examples of common problems that show up in front of professional specialists daily for them to try and repair.
When you get Western Digital hard drive clicking noise or Maxtor hard drive clicking noise they should be very rare cases that instead of just trying to fix by yourself you should try to go to the manufacturer. Within warranty time you"ll very likely have a free replacement and when possible the data will be recovered free of charge for you. If it"s past warranty time you should still try to take the hard drive to the manufacturer since they will have the most skilled professional specialists and tools for the recovery.
If you get Xbox hard drive clicking, it"s no big surprise since this is an example of a very cheap hard drive. In this case you may try to do something to retrieve the data or attempt to fix the clicking noises but you may not be successful. You should take the hard drive to your local computer shop"s professional specialist so that they may try to recover any relevant data that you may find in there.
When possible you should always resort to the warranty. Most of the time these hard drives fail within the warranty so you can use it to try and get a free replacement or press for a repair on the hard drive. Unfortunately, these repairs many times are very short lived and are a very unwelcome solution.
In the latter cases, when you retrieve the clicking hard drive, you should as quickly as possible recover the information. Optimally, you should backup the information constantly before any problem arises, but not always this is possible so you should try to recover any data while the hard drive still functions afterwards because it may fail at any moment. Having too much faith on the repaired hard drive may lead to yet another clicking hard drive occurrence and it may be terminal for the hard drive.
In order to perform emergency data recovery on clicking hard drives, you can follow the procedures like for any other faulty hard drive. Use a program like Active@ Data Recovery and use a second hard drive to safe the information that you extract from the clicking hard drive. Afterwards, use the clicking hard drive only for minor things that have no harm in being lost.