Folkert Rienstra wrote:
"James Sweet" wrote in message news:rzYyf.15937$h47.10775@trnddc08

mm wrote:

On 16 Jan 2006 08:17:07 -0800, " wrote:
....


I've opened hard drives again and again in very filthy rooms and
they've never shown any ill effects over the days, or in some cases
weeks, that I operated them. I do this all the time with old drives
because I can see what's happening inside the drive while I test my
control circuitry.

If I was manufacturing hundreds of thousands of drives and had to worry
about warranties and customer satisfaction, I'd be doing it in a clean
room. And I would buy a new drive before attempting to repair a damaged
one. But you definitely can operate a hard drive without the cover for
a while; probably long enough to do whatever you want if you don't dawdle.


My drive is clicking, and one important partition has a very bad
directory structure. I'm not sure I can copy over even the good
partitions before it "fails". If I open it, what would I want to do
to stop the clicking, or to keep the clicking syndrome from preventing
me from copying the data to a good drive.


There's nothing you can do by opening it.


If it's clicking that means it's unable to read the disc


due to a hardware failure.


Nonsense.
If it's clicking it means it does a rezero every time it retries a read operation.
It does that on ECC errors and also on CRC errors on the interface.
Neither is necessarily caused by a hardware failure.
Bad power supply, overheated drive or bad data cable can cause this too.



Every single time I've ever had a hard drive clicking it was caused by a
failure of the drive, I've never even heard of it caused by those other
issues, with the exception being a couple of early very hot running 10K
rpm drives. Bad drive is 99% the reason.