Discovering that a hard drive is failing — through clicking noises, sudden slowdowns, or Windows throwing disk errors — is stressful, especially if it holds files you never backed up. The good news is that many failing drives can still yield most or all of their data if you act carefully and in the right order; the bad news is that the wrong first move can turn a recoverable situation into a permanent loss. This guide walks through what to do, and what to avoid, when a drive is on its way out.

The single most important rule: the moment you suspect a drive is failing, stop using it for anything beyond recovery. Every additional read/write operation on a failing drive increases the risk of further degradation, and continuing to use it for normal tasks (installing recovery software onto it, browsing, saving new files) can push it from "struggling" to "unreadable."

Recognising the warning signs

Act quickly if you notice any of these:

  • Clicking, grinding, or repetitive clunking noises — almost always mechanical failure on an HDD (the read/write head struggling to find data, or a physical fault), and a strong signal to stop using the drive immediately.
  • Files that take unusually long to open, or File Explorer freezing when accessing certain folders.
  • Windows reporting "Disk error", CRC errors, or "The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable."
  • A drive that disappears and reappears in File Explorer or fails to be detected on boot.
  • CrystalDiskInfo showing a "Caution" or "Bad" status, particularly with rising Reallocated Sector Count, Pending Sector Count, or Uncorrectable Sector Count values in its SMART attribute list.

Step 1: Stop and assess — don't make it worse

  1. If the PC is still running and the drive is still detected, immediately copy anything critical to another drive or cloud storage rather than continuing normal use.
  2. If the drive is making clicking or grinding noises, power down the PC immediately. Continuing to run a mechanically failing drive risks the read/write head contacting the platter surface, which can cause catastrophic, unrecoverable data loss.
  3. Do not run CHKDSK, disk defragmentation, or any "repair" tool on a drive you suspect is physically failing — these write to the drive and can overwrite recoverable data or push a struggling drive over the edge.
  4. Do not install recovery software onto the failing drive itself — always install it on a different, healthy drive (typically your Windows boot drive, or a USB stick).

If the drive is making mechanical noise, treat this as a hardware emergency rather than a software recovery job. Continuing to power it on repeatedly to "try again" is one of the most common ways people turn a professionally recoverable drive into one that isn't.

Step 2: For drives that are still detected — try software recovery

If the drive still shows up in Windows (even if slow or throwing occasional errors) and isn't making physical noise, software recovery is worth attempting first.

  1. Connect the failing drive as a secondary drive to a working PC, either internally or via a USB-to-SATA adapter, rather than trying to boot from it.
  2. Use a reputable free recovery tool: - Recuva (Piriform) — straightforward and effective for accidentally deleted files or lightly corrupted file systems. - PhotoRec (free, open-source) — works at a lower level, scanning for recognisable file signatures even when the file system itself is badly damaged; excellent for severely corrupted drives, though it recovers files without their original names/folder structure. - TestDisk — pairs with PhotoRec and is particularly good at recovering lost or damaged partitions.
  3. Recover to a different physical drive, never back onto the failing drive itself — writing recovered data back to a struggling drive risks overwriting other recoverable files still on it.
  4. Prioritise recovering the most important and time-sensitive files first (documents, photos, financial records) in case the drive fails completely partway through the process.
  5. Once initial critical files are safely copied elsewhere, run a fuller scan to catch anything missed, accepting this may take several hours on a large or struggling drive.

Step 3: For drives with SMART warnings but no clicking

If CrystalDiskInfo shows warning-level SMART attributes but the drive is otherwise readable:

  1. Immediately do a full backup of everything on the drive to a healthy drive — treat any SMART warning as "this drive could fail at any time," even if it's currently working normally.
  2. Once backed up, consider the drive no longer safe for primary storage. Repurposing it for non-critical, easily-replaceable data (temporary downloads, a media cache) is reasonable, but don't trust it with anything irreplaceable again.
  3. Check whether the warning attributes are climbing over time by re-running CrystalDiskInfo weekly for a month — a stable, unchanging warning is lower-risk than one that's actively worsening.

Step 4: When a drive is undetected or making noise — stop DIY attempts

If the drive isn't detected at all by the PC or another computer, or is making mechanical noise, further DIY attempts (including freezer tricks or opening the drive casing, both persistent internet myths) will not reliably help and can cause additional, permanent damage. Modern hard drives are precision-sealed instruments; opening the casing outside a dust-free cleanroom environment introduces particles that can scratch the platters on the very next spin-up.

At this point, your realistic options are:

  • Professional data recovery services — UK-based specialists (several operate cleanroom facilities and offer no-data-no-fee diagnostics) can often recover data from drives with failed read/write heads, firmware corruption, or even some platter damage, using specialist equipment not available to consumers. Costs typically range from roughly £300 to £1,000+ depending on severity and urgency, which is worth weighing against how irreplaceable the data actually is.
  • Accepting the loss, if the data isn't valuable enough to justify professional recovery costs, and instead focusing on getting a replacement drive set up correctly with proper backups going forward.

Get quotes from at least two specialist recovery firms before committing, and ask specifically whether they offer a "no data, no fee" diagnostic assessment — this lets you find out whether recovery is realistic before paying anything.

Preventing this next time

The best response to a scare like this is to make sure it can't cause total loss again:

  • Set up an automated backup with Macrium Reflect Free or Windows' built-in File History to a separate physical drive, ideally supplemented with a cloud backup for critical files.
  • Follow the 3-2-1 rule: at least 3 copies of important data, on 2 different types of media, with 1 copy stored offsite (cloud storage counts as offsite).
  • Check drive health with CrystalDiskInfo every 2-3 months as part of routine PC maintenance, so early warning signs are caught long before a drive reaches the noisy, undetected stage.

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