G+_Michael Heinz Posted August 6, 2015 Share Posted August 6, 2015 Well, that was something out of "Tales from the IT Crypt"... I have a 2-drive NAS in the basement for streaming music, video and doing backups. It's been there for years, plugging away, no problems. I've occasionally thought about needing to upgrade but it's been more than enough for my needs and the monthly "health reports" it sent me always said everything was fine... A week ago, the NAS emails me to tell me drive A is developing bad sectors. Okay. So I move all the data that's on drive A to drive B and start window shopping for new drives; but there's no hurry, everything's fine... plenty of time. This afternoon the NAS emails me again. It's a suicide note. The remaining drive has crashed. My son? and I tried several different approaches - using fsck directly from the NAS, physically moving the drive to Mike's windows machine and trying to pull data off that way... Finally, the last time I put it in a machine, I apply power an all I hear is "click.... click.... click...." I don't think I've heard the click of death in 10 years or more! The good news is that, yes, I had redundant backups of a lot of the data. I'm sure we lost a ton of stuff but no one can definitively think of anything they needed that I don't have another copy of. I guess the next step would be to buy a copy of SpinRite but that click makes me think I've got an actual mechanical failure on my hands. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Allen Robberson Posted August 6, 2015 Share Posted August 6, 2015 use spinrite it will fix both drives Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Jeff Brand Posted August 6, 2015 Share Posted August 6, 2015 While the Click of Death is usually a reference to an Iomega ZIP drive issue (for which Steve Gibson also had a handy tool), many of us are familiar with the clicking noise you're talking about - and SpinRite can't help. SpinRite requires that the drive passes its self-checks and properly initializes itself to "be a hard drive." The clicking you're hearing is due a failure in the drive's startup checks. If I remember correctly, there's a calibration region on the drive that the head passes over. When the expected values aren't detected, the drive attempts to reposition the heads over the correct area which is the click you hear. The cause can often be a change/drift in the magnetic sensing components of the read head. The fridge trick can help change the electrical properties of the sensor just enough so that it's back within tolerances long enough to initialize and read some data. Sorry to hear about your bad luck. It looks like RAID-5/6 configurations are in your future. This also demonstrates the need for off-site backup.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Ben Tyger Posted August 7, 2015 Share Posted August 7, 2015 The click of death is the arm not being able to get a sector lock and resets (the click) and tries again. Are the clicks happening on both drives or one? Since this was a raid1 setup, if spinrite works on one of the drives, you can recover the data. Also, for the future, make sure to buy drives from different batches. That's probably why the drives died so close together. First drive dies from old age; you swap the first for a new drive; array rebuild starts; the second fails because of high stress of rebuild because the second drive is just as similar as the first. ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Jeff Brand Posted August 7, 2015 Share Posted August 7, 2015 From the original description it sounded like the drives were operating independently. That said, he hadn't reported that the click was happening on the first drive so that's the one to run SpinRite on. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Ben Tyger Posted August 7, 2015 Share Posted August 7, 2015 Jeff Brand Sorry I think your right. It wasn't in a RAID1 configuration. He may be SOL. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Michael Heinz Posted August 7, 2015 Author Share Posted August 7, 2015 Right, no RAID. The drives were actually different ages, sizes and models. One came with the NAS the other I added a year later. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Jason Marsh Posted August 7, 2015 Share Posted August 7, 2015 Try the fridge trick, the blanket trick, the whack trick, and when you've tried it all but can't get anything off of it, the lead slug treatment. I've only had a handful of drives that've gotten the click, and about half would function once after cooling, heating, or a gentle whack with a screwdriver handle on the side. Whether or not they give up the data, they're all unceremoniously executed with a rifle volley. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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