I've experienced the click of death on my WD3200JS and I'm trying to recover some data from it. The situation is as follows:
- I hear the click od death during normal PC operation. The PC freezes (it's my system drive).
- I restart the PC, the disk spins up and starts clicking.
- I google the problem (haven't heard of the click of death before).
- Knowing I can't afford data recovery, I try a quick freeze, take it out, wait 5 minutes. The drive does indeed start up but gets back to clicking after about 2 minutes.
- This time I put it in the freezer for about two hours. After taking it out I don't wait and plug it into my PC - this time the drive fails to spin up properly. I figure I should have waited after all, so I wait a bit and plug it in - click click.
- I give up.
- On the next day, feeling lucky, I plug the disk in to a running PC (without any freezing, I just took it off the table) - the disk works for a few minutes, allowing me to copy some crucial data. WTH??
And now my question is - is there a slight chance this is being caused by a PCB malfunction, in which case I should try replacing the PCB? Or should I just keep trying to freeze it until the disk gives up? The data on the platter appears intact, everything I copied was in perfect shape, but it was very little and I'm afraid of running this disk if there's a risk of damaging the data. Who knows, maybe in a few years I'll be able to afford data recovery from it...
ddrescue
for a resumable bit-by-bit copy to another drive.