Hacking toasted hard drive?

[vexing]

my usb hard drive got knocked over, and now it takes forever to read things. it makes a clicking noise every few seconds like the read head is having trouble moving or something.
i really don't have much experience with hardware, and it seems really doubtful but is there anything i can do to potentially fix this?

 

[Krestent]

It's toast, or soon will be.

 

[olliepop2000]

I'd backup anything important off it immediately while you still can.
btw the clicking sound is the when the head is struggling to get the position and keeps knocking against the buffer. it's dying.

 

[BBking83]

I always get a sadface when my HDDs click.

Had two this year already.

 

[harmor]

I should buy a second hard drive just in case.
I'll back up my games to the second hard drive every so often and store it in a safe place.

This way if my primary hard drive ever fails I won't cry.

 

[BBking83]

I get a sadface mainly cause it's a pain in the arse to reinstall everything.

I've got backup of backup.

 

[mistajase]

I had similar thing happen to me, the drive did eventually die a few weeks later. I did manage to back up most my files b4 it bit the dust.

time to get a new drive m8, i managed to get a HDD enclosure for less than £10 off ebay and slapped an old IDE dive from an old PC.

There are HDD recovery tools but they dont always work (like if its hardware failure). There are even recovery companies which take the HHD apart and re-seat the internal gold disks into a new drive to recover data.