So, I've been doing some computer maintenance with an old laptop. Nothing special, just cleaning, process management, etc. as well as converting a FAT32 drive to NTFS and almost going to merge two partitions.
After a shutdown, the BIOS now doesn't recognise the HDD and it's clicking.
Halp!
It was knocking and it has progressed to scratching.
Well, <any word I can't say on the forums, take your pick>.
It's pretty much screwed. However I think you can get the option to recover data on the drive still. You'll have to take it to an expert. There are some businesses which do this. They probably take the disk platter off and put it on another drive and then extract data off it. You could do it yourself if you had an exact or similar drive. But don't do it unless your sure.
Only the other option is freezing it which may work or would probably ruin the drive even more but... it's not going to get better. I'd stay away from booting it up for a while until you get it looked at, as the disk may take more damage each time.
Yeah, it's shot and dead. I'm hoping we can get data off without doing the platter transplant as that seems to be quite expensive, but we'll see.
Otherwise, I'm just looking through who we're going to take it to and preparing a lecture on why you should always back up everything regularly. And that's the important message here kids!
Question answered: The drive's toast.
Locked because Champ said so.