Head Clicking is a common problem for Western Digital drives.Generally speaking,there are 3 reasons may cause the drive click.
- PCB
- Firmware
- Head
Obviously,the first step for us is to judge which factor caused the clicking sound.Following this method,our flow-chart will be:establish a system of exclusions that will enable us to discard all the wrong factors one by one, to approach a selection of that factor which will present itself as true.
- PCB
- Firmware
- Head
The easiest way to figure out PCB problem is changing another compatible PCB from a donor drive.If the drive stop clicking after changed the PCB.It means the PCB was damaged.
Hot swap is the way to verify the firmware problem.Connect the donor drive to the hd doctor.Power on the console and load from hdd.Stop the motor after the harddrive info can be seen.Then remove the pcb from the donor drive with power on and connect it to the patient drive.Attention:Do not cut off the power during this period or you will fail in hot swap pcb.
Start the motor after the donor pcb connected to the patient drive.The drive will be busy for a while then get ready.Try to backup some modules or read sectors,if the drive stop clicking,it means there is something wrong with the firmware of the patient drive.If not,the problem should be the head.
We can take a write/read test with hd doctor for WD.Besides,there is another trick to test the head.Double click one module from the module list and try to edit some characters.Then click save and re-open it.Check whether these characters has been changed or not.If so,the drive is OK and vice versa.
In conclusion,not every clicking sound is caused by the head.So please don’t try to swap the head in the beginning.Maybe,I said maybe,it’s not so difficult as you thought before.
Justin
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