250GB Seagate Hard Drive Clicking

Case Study: 389711

We received a 250GB Seagate hard drive where the customer reported symptoms included the drive being unrecognized by the BIOS and it had been making a clicking sound. With Seagate drives, most often if it is clicking, the drive has usually suffered a physical failure. In most cases the heads are bad.

After a quick inspection of the drive in our clean room, we were able to determine that no obvious scoring to the platters was evident. We then had to order the parts needed in order to complete a successful head swap. We keep a large inventory of hard drives on hand, but we didn't have one for this particular model that had the same Site Code. This is a critical item that must be matched when swapping heads on Seagate hard drives.

The following week we received the parts needed, and we proceeded with the head swap. This procedure is pretty straight forward on these drives, and it was completed successfully. However, when we started the imaging process the drive would only read a few sectors at a time, and then reset, read a few more sectors and reset. We then tried to reverse image the drive, but had the same results. We then skipped forward from the beginning to about the 10 millionth sector and started imaging from there. We were able to get a clean image for the remainder of the drive, and when it cycled back around to pick up what was skipped at the beginning, it was also able to read this without any problem.

Occasionally we see these kinds of problems with drive imaging, where it seems impossible to image the drive at first, but then it "magically" starts to perform perfectly. This is most likely caused by some minor particle contamination on one of the heads which is cleared up as the drive continues to operate. In cases where it doesn't clear up, then we will take those heads and attempt to clean them, and if it is still not working properly, we will try a different set of heads, since it may be an alignment issue.