A computer tragedy has occurred....

[DizzyDigger]

The bad drive was a lower end Toshiba marked as manufactured back in 2016. It was the original one that Dell installed when I bought the computer, and lasted several years.

The clicking started to show itself several months ago, but I thought the sound was coming from an oil-filled heater. That's the problem with having limited hearing and only one working ear..can't tell where sound is coming from, and by the time I did finally figure it out it was too late. ☠️

Live and learn, I guess.

 

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[bc5391]

It's a mechanical failure..there's no recovering any data unless I pay big $$ to a specialist recovery company, and even then it's "iffy".



Already have a back-up plan in several 128 GB USB drives, so not only will I back it up, I'll have copies of the back-up.

I used a program called forensic toolkit 1.71. Mine was also completely lost, would not boot.

 

[dognose]

that's a bummer for sure

I would recommend getting a 1 terabyte external hard drive and two 3 gig thumb drives

every month backup to the 1 terabyte drive and daily or every other day backup to the thumb drives.
keep your virus protection updated.
backup religiously.
keep one in the safe and rotate backups


use 7zip to compress your backups. learn to code and write a backup bat file to backup specific folders to the backup drive.

always a good thing to have backups.