Hard Drive

Those clicking sounds are usually a signal of imminent drive failure. Since no OS can be found at boot is sounds like the drive has failed totally. You're only option at this point is a data recovery service that takes the drive apart and pulls the data off the individual platters. It can be very expensive.

Once you first use a hard disk, it's only a matter of time until it fails.

Your best bet is to replace the hard disk, and then decide how expensive it would be to replace/recreate any data on it. Chances are, unless this drive served a DB or important file share and nothing has been backed up for a while, that it will be more expensive to recover the data from the drive itself.

There are some shareware and freeware solutions that you could search the net for, but they were of absolutelyno help to me with both hard drive failures I've had in the last month. Can't hurt to set up a test machine and see what you can get though.

Before you give up on the drive, try the tips in the Tech Republic download "200 ways to revive a dead hard drive"

Many of the tips in the article can at least recover the data from the drive.

Of course, if the data is mission critical, the less you do to the drive, the easier it is for the recovery service to do their job.

Chas

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