External HD failure

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Well it happened after 4 months of use. It is a Comstar 3.5" external 500GB hard drive. It was running smoothly up until today when I went to turn it on and it just kept clicking and nothing else. I tried unplugging it, putting it in a different USB port, rebooted the computer, tried on another computer and no luck, tried looking in disk management and couldn't even see it there. The only way to know for sure is to probably open the HD enclosure pull out the hard drive and put it in my computer. The problem is, if I do that then I void the warranty and if it is the actual hard drive that is defective then I loose both the data and the HD because I wouldn't be able to return it.

if you have any suggestions on other ways I can troubleshoot then please let me know or if you know good External hard drive that is better then this crap please let me know.

Thanks

 

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If its clicking then it could very well be the read write heads, theres not much you could do unless you know how to replace them, if thats at all possible.

If I were you I would get the data on it transfered as soon as possible before it goes bye bye and you loose whatever data is on it.

 

I really do want to transfer the data over to another hd, but I can't it wont get recognized by the os and it costs a lot of money to do it with a company. I am just praying that is has something to do with the encluser and that the hd is intact but I don't think thats the case.

 

Shop around for companies that will get your data transfered.

I know your in Canada so I can't say but in the UK I have seen prices for data transfer range from £20 - £50 and the UK is renowned for being a rip off for anything you buy.

 

Yeah sparky the drive is under warranty and I can't even open the enclosure or else I lose the warranty too. It sucks big time since I had all my music, docs, apps, movies. I spent a whole day converting my dvd's to avi and storing them on the hard drive. At least I still the the dvd's and music cd's. But apps like Nero which I just bought online is gone.

 

Clicking noise is an indication of physical crash of the hard drive. But If the hard drive is shown in BIOS then there is a fair chance of recovery, you can try data recovery software to recover lost data. What you can do is to attach your hard drive as a slave and then scan install the data recovery software on a healthy system and scan your infected hard drive. If the scan result shows you the preview of the data then the software is definitely going to recover the data. You can try Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Software.
Hope it does provide some help to your hard drive.