Manufacturer: Seagate
Model: Backup Plus. Internal drive: ST1000LM010
Capacity: 1TB
Symptoms: Customer states the hard drive was clicking and was no longer recognized by their PC. Drive has important family pictures and videos.
Evaluation: Cleanroom inspection confirmed physically damaged heads and light platter damage. Platter damage is extremely common with clicking hard drives. Fortunately, in this case, the drive was not powered on after the customer noticed the clicking sound and the platter damage did not affect critical areas of the drive.
Recovery Process: The drive required a head replacement in our cleanroom, followed by controlled hardware imaging that targeted the critical data first, and allowed us to safely extract readable sectors while minimizing further media stress.
Warning: There is no software or firmware solution for a clicking drive and putting a clicking drive in the freezer will not help and may cause further harm.
Results: Approximately 90% of user data was recovered successfully. Some files were unrecoverable due to platter damage.
