Ok, newbie here, so please bear with me...

Having trawled around the net in search of assistance/knowledge regarding my broken HDD, I find myself on this forum.

I have a 320GB external, desktop HDD in a LaCie enclosure (not sure of the make of the internal HDD).
Without even connecting it to my PowerBook G4 via the Firewire 400 cable, it is obvious there is a problem.

To keep this description short, the drive currently exhibits these symptoms...
On power up, the drive can be heard to accelerate as normal (spin up?), then just before I would normally hear soft clicking, as data is found and accessed, the drive enters a loop between whirrring and clicking (the click is like 2 ball bearings striking one another). I get: whirrrr...click...whirrrr...click...whirrrr...click...whirrrr...click... for about 30 seconds, then the drive gives up and spins back down to silent. AFAIK this is the heads failing to find a start track and resetting to zero (obviously in very simple terms).

Having read thru various pages of what might be happening and some solutions to try (putting the disk in the freezer! Is that leg pulling? honestly!), I want to understand as much as I can so that I might be able to diagnose the fault.

What can I do "myself" to diagnose the problem, safely?
What apps/tools are available for home diagnosis?
Are there steps I can take before having to look at the next level of recovery?

I have been in contact with LaCie and whilst they have been unable to help directly, they pointed me towards two software products that might help: Data Rescue 3 (Prosoft engineering) and DiskWarrior (Alsoft [which I have some experience with in the past]). Would either of these be worth considering in my situation?

I am unable to access the drive via Disk Utility but is does show up in the Apple System profiler, under the 'firewire' devices listing, albeit as an 'unkown' disk!

I can see from the information available on this site that there is a heck of a lot to know in this subject area and I understand that this is not just a matter of prod this and tweak that, but would like to learn how much can be done by the DIYer.

Thank you for your time reading this.

Software cannot help in this case.
Very probably heads are dead (or preamp) and thats why they keep hitting the limiter.
Thats what making this clicking sound.
The worst you can do now is letting the drive click all the time, because after some time this is going to give media damage.
I often get drives in that they left in the shop clicking for some days, in the vain hope that it will start working again.
In most cases, after we open the drive, the data falls out in the form of dust; what we call data-dust (@ pcimage). Nothing can help there.
Stupid idea of Lacie to advice software for a clicking drive.

In your case, sorry to say, only a pro can help.

Dobre

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