Loosing My data Need Help

[jordanjames23]

On at least two occasions I have heard a sort of clicking noise (one or two at the most) coming from my pc. I have a 40 GB hd primary and a 160GB ide hd slave. I'm not sure if this is my hard drive failing. I have listened to the "failing hard drive" samples on I think maxtor or sony's site and the first sample sounded similar to the noise I heard, only the noise didn't repeat over and over, it just sounded once or twice really quickly.
Also, my system has been crashing and I don't know if this is because of a program I installed or if it is my hard drive actually starting to fail. Is there a way to check what is causing it to crash? If I post the error report the next time it crashes, would someone be able to decipher what the cause is?

[Fanche]

Did you try to read the smart data of your HDD with a soft like hitachi feature tool? It can informe you if the HDD has detected some internal problem.
But any ways you should save your important datas qwickly cause those noises don't sounds good for your HDD.
Try to look at the temperature of your HDD too, cause when they're near to crash, they tend to heat too much.

[cameron_798]

Occasional clicking is probably not anything to worry about.
Do standard maintenance; disk cleanup, error checking, defragmenter.
It could just be the click as the read head swings from one extreme to another because your drive needs to be optimized in that manner.

To see if the drive has problems; you should first make sure that if your BIOS support it that SMART is enabled for those drives. SMART will warn you if the drive is experiencing problems, which could lead to failure.

The other thing to do is to go to the drives manufacturer and download their diagnostic tool and run it. It will let you know if the drive has any problems and if you need to be prepared to replace it. If so it will produce a report to submit for warranty replacement if the drive is covered. In case you loose data for HDD failure, you may contact any reliable hard drive recovery lab. My friend told me about Salvage Data Recovery Lab at 76 Progress Drive Corporate Park; Stamford, CT 06902. I used their services couple of times for my office computers. Reliable and well experienced guys.

[fofo]

Occasional clicking is probably not anything to worry about.
Do standard maintenance; disk cleanup, error checking, defragmenter.
It could just be the click as the read head swings from one extreme to another because your drive needs to be optimized in that manner.

To see if the drive has problems; you should first make sure that if your BIOS support it that SMART is enabled for those drives. SMART will warn you if the drive is experiencing problems, which could lead to failure.

The other thing to do is to go to the drives manufacturer and download their diagnostic tool and run it. It will let you know if the drive has any problems and if you need to be prepared to replace it. If so it will produce a report to submit for warranty replacement if the drive is covered. In case you loose data for HDD failure, you may contact any reliable hard drive recovery lab. My friend told me about Salvage Data Recovery Lab at 76 Progress Drive Corporate Park; Stamford, CT 06902. I used their services couple of times for my office computers. Reliable and well experienced guys.

I always activate SMART on all my drives, SMART never tell me my drives were dying. But each drive I've god that started to made these strange noises stops working after few days (weeks).

You should really do backup BEFORE trying to do any heavy maintenance operation such as full scandisk or defragmentation.

ps. Data recovery services are very expensive it may be OK for a firm, but not for a normal guy that lost his divx / mp3

[jihef]

SMART is just a technology that gathers various data from the drives. If you want to know the fitness of your drive you must recover SMART data and feed it to some SMART software like smartmontools.

[fofo]

SMART is just a technology that gathers various data from the drives. If you want to know the fitness of your drive you must recover SMART data and feed it to some SMART software like smartmontools.

it's what i've always done, and except for telling me a cable was not perfectly working or to monitor my hdd temperature, it never announce me the death of any hard-drive that actualy already died uin: in fact its not a very SMART technology (yes I'm proud about this joke :D )