Question: Last week my HDD apparently died. I could neither boot nor even read it when booting a live debian distro. When powering up the HDD, it makes the following sound:
- https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwjYARtEfuKgR3VVQUdrSVZCZXc
- https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwjYARtEfuKgWWxSQlk4c3BwaHM
I also tried to connect it as an external HDD and dmesg reported the following:
[114817.677736] usb 1-2: new high-speed USB device number 8 using xhci_hcd[114817.807355] usb 1-2: New USB device found, idVendor=152d, idProduct=2338[114817.807361] usb 1-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=5[114817.807364] usb 1-2: Product: USB to ATA/ATAPI Bridge[114817.807366] usb 1-2: Manufacturer: JMicron[114817.807368] usb 1-2: SerialNumber: 152D203380B6[114817.808377] usb-storage 1-2:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected[114817.808568] scsi12 : usb-storage 1-2:1.0[114818.806902] scsi 12:0:0:0: Direct-Access ???PQ: 0 ANSI: 2 CCS[114818.807114] sd 12:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0[114818.808349] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdc] Test WP failed, assume Write Enabled[114818.808787] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdc] Asking for cache data failed[114818.808790] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through[114818.811560] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI disk
I even tried dd if=/dev/sdc of=./sample bs=100M count=1 to see if I could read anything, but the resulting file was completely empty. Needless to say, no partitions are recognized at all and I cannot even format it.
Are these indicating a dead hard drive or is there any hope of being able to retrieve anything from it? Thankfully, I don’t have anything of high importance to be retrieved.
The HDD was a 1000GB Seagate, bought in 2012.
Answer: That is the “click of death“.
Aside from the off-chance it may start working if the drive electronics are replaced with a PCB from an IDENTICAL drive, the drive is dead — replace it.
Some related SU questions you may want to check out:
- What is causing my hard drive’s click of death?
- Click of death – freeze or replace PCB?
- Can a “click of death” from one drive cause an SMI (system management interrupt) or similar?