Is your computer clicking or clunking?
Is your laptop clicking or clunking?
Is your external hard-drive clicking or clunking?
Should I be worried???
Damn right you should be
A click-click or clunk-clunk noise coming from your computer, laptop or external hard-drive is the noise of your hard-drive dying. Its trying to tell you that its not going to live much longer and its time to be replaced. If your lucky you've noticed it in time and shut your system off and will be able to copy the drive without data loss.
This noise is also known as the clunk-of-death or click-of-death for your hard drive.
Hopefully it's only been making a noise for a short time, the longer you continue to use a clicking drive the more damage you are doing to it and the less chance of recovering your data from it.
DO NOT RUN DEFRAG, or DO NOT RUN SYSTEM TOOLS or DO NOT RUN SYSTEM RECOVERY. The more work you do on this drive, the more likely you are to damage it. So do the following.
- If you have an external data source or can connect to another computer via a network connect to it now
OR
- If you can easily connect to a cloud based backup source such as google drive, connect to it now
OR
- If you can purchase or borrow purchase an external drive or flash drive , do so immediately.
Link to the other storage source and start copying your most important files to the new source …. if you get a message saying your computer cannot read a file, press “Skip” and continue to copy as much data as you can before it crashes completely.
This may take several attempts and you may not be able to copy every file, some files may have already been corrupted or damaged. Start with your most important data such as “My Documents“, “My Pictures” etc …. do not worry about program files as these can be easily re-installed from scratch at a later date.
:jk:
