Skipping Hard Drive / Clicking Noise inside

I have a 500GB WD external hard drive with USB connectivity.  Every time I plug it in to my computer now and turn it on the drive will spin up and there’s a series of clicking noises like something is skipping.  It then stops spinning and is unrecognized by the computer.  Any ideas of what this is or thoughts on what to do?  Thanks everyone!

It doesn’t sound good. You can try moving to dofferent ports and see if it helps. If still under warranty probably the best thing is to call customer service.

mine just started doing the same thing last week. I have to keep unplugging and replugging it in till it finally works right.

Mine did that about 4 months ago. I had to unplug and replug it into my comuter as well. Finally, all I got was a clicking and spinning noise and my computer couldn’t recognize it anymorte.  Ipluggeed it into a different computer and it gave me an error message saying that the drive could not be ecognized. I finally took it to someone who fixes drives. According to them the drive is toast. I now have to find someone else to take the drive apart put retrieve 2 years of data. And my drive is no longer under warranty too. So, check your drives and go by something made from seagate or HP and transfer everything now!!

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Mark Twain said  “The man who sets out to carry a cat by the tail learns something
that will always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful.” You just learned the danger of trusting data to ONE physical HD regardless who makes it or how it is connected. The forum is full of these posts about lost data that isn’t backed up else where.

My WD5000 MyBook started this clicking and trying to spin up process. After reading some web posts, i bought a SATA to USB converter and hooked the drive directly to the USB port… Sadly, the same thing happens with this controller. So it is  obviously the drive itself.

Is there anything that can be done short of paying $1K to get the data recovered in a clean room? I don’t think my data is worth that much, but some of it is irreplacable.