Hi Guys

I'm new to this forum and I'm not a HDD expert. If this problem is not an easy fix I will be sending the hard drive off for recovery.

I have a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB hard drive. When I mount this into to the dock, the drive is recognized and I can see all of the folders and files. If I try to copy any of the folders the hard drive freezes. I can copy small files for a period and then again it shuts down. There is a clunking noise coming from the hard drive and when it stops responding there is a sudden clunk and them it goes off line. Any diagnosis software I try to use causes the drive to shutdown.

If this is a faulty circuit board or if the head needs replacing I think I could managed this, but I'm not going top touch the platter.

Any Help or advice would be much appreciated

First off, if the data is important you should really consider professional recovery. At this point it likely will only be $300-500, but if you push it will become thousands or even become un-recoverable. Seagates are a nighmare when they completely fail.

If you data isn't that important or you're not willing to pay to recover it, then you might consider trying to clone the drive using ddrescue in Linux. I wrote a guide here you can follow. It's really the only software option that can sometimes clone drives acting like you're describing.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

personally i would first examine the terminal log, I suspect falling/bad heads and or media damage, which in that case ddrescue will not help at best, and most of the time will make thing worse.

Hi Guys

Thanks for all of your comments and advice. I tried most of the things you all advised within my skill set but still no successes. I have the hard plugged directly into my PC as suggest by Spildit but as soon as I touch the files I get the clunk and the hard drive goes of line. It does however still continue spinning. I did manage to run the attached basic diagnostic but this doesn't really mean anything to me. I might try changing the PCB as a last attempt to see what happens.

You need to follow the ddrescue guide I posted above, clone the drive onto another working drive, then try to open your files from the new drive, not from the old one. And likely you'll need to run some data recovery software against the new drive afterward anyway, as likely there's damage to the file system.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company