They had been using their Western Digital My Passport to store their research documents, photos, and videosuntil the drive went belly-up.

Read on to find out what makes your hard disk drive click, how much danger the files on your hard drive might be in, and what you can do to retrieve that data.

Clicking Western Digital My Passport Not Recognized The Dreaded Click of Death A healthy hard drive clicks once upon starting up.

This is the sound of the readwrite heads moving up the ramp that guides them into place over the data storage platters.

When a hard drives readwrite heads fail, though, they produce an altogether nastier clicking noise.

As the failed readwrite heads blindly sweep over the platters and return to their starting position over and over again, they produce a rhythmic and repetitive clicking noise.

This noise does not bode well for the hard drivecomputer repair professionals call it the Click of Death for a reason.

When a hard drive starts clicking, the damage to the readwrite heads can be mild, moderate, or severe, but theres no way to tell how bad the situation is without removing the drives faceplate and taking a peek at its platters.

CLICK HERE to get an estimate for data recovery costs Clicking Western Digital Hard Drive Recovery: WD My Passport Not Recognized All of the data on your hard drive lives on the surfaces of the hard disk platters within the drive.

Most hard drives have multiple platters, writing data to both sides of each.

When readwrite heads fail, some fail more severely than otherswhich can lead to one platter surface sustaining heavier damage than its neighbors.

When our cleanroom engineers examined this hard drive, we found ourselves looking at a dire data recovery situation.

Of the two platters inside this clicking Western Digital hard drive, the top surface of the topmost platter had suffered severely.

Concentric rings on the platters surface had been gouged out by the mangled readwrite head.

This is the severe hard drive malady we refer to as rotational scoring.

But the other surfaces of the platters had no visible damage, so our engineers werent about to write this case off as a loss.

To salvage the data from the remaining platter surfaces, our engineers took each platter and carefully polished them.

Rotational scoring scrapes the thin layers of magnetic alloys holding your data off of the platters surfaces.

The scraped-off material becomes dust, which can settle all around the hard drives insides.

Even these tiny particles are much, much larger than the distance between the readwrite heads and the platter surface.

The dust has to be removed in order for data recovery work to continue.

Without a way to remove the dust and polish these platters, it would have been impossible to salvage any data from this driveeven though only one platter surface had been scored.

This technology is just one of the many things that set Gillware Data Recovery apart from other data recovery companies.

If you have a clicking Western Digital hard drive, CLICK HERE to contact our Client Advisors Clicking Western Digital Hard Drive Recovery Case Study: The client in this data recovery case came to Gillware with a clicking Western Digital hard drive.

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