I've had two WD laptop drives with 1-2 UNC's each. Tried to resurrect them by running a erase delays. On both of them it seems to kill them and now they have the click of death and won't go ready at all.

I am able to get some other Seagate drives working again - just for fun of course.

Does excising the entire drive by doing a scan increase the changes of if failing horribly?

I had another drive that I was about to image - but decided to scan it for errors - and that was all she wrote....

The UNC was something worse than a "bad sector" : there was a surface problem and when heads ran on that area got killed. Business as usual on laptop drives when they are kicked hard.

So would an expert be able to recover data from a drive that failed like this? And yes I think where was some impact force on the laptop.

Before you killed the drive, most likely. After you killed the drive, it will depend on the condition of the surface. One thing is for certain, the attempt to repair likely added at least $1000 to the cost to recover the data and decreased the odds by 50%...IMHO, of course.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery