Common Faults observed in Hard Disk Drives - Failure - Failed - Dead!

Commonly known as the 'Click of Death'. Your hard drive is on its way out, along with your data. One of the noisy hd faults.
A common fault which is usually easy to spot. When the drive is initially powered up, a logic check ensures that the drive has attained the necessary speed before launching the heads across the platter. If the drive can not attain a 'Ready' state, the logic is repeated for a pre-determined number of times causing a clicking sound, after which it stops trying.Your hard disk drive now appears dead.

Do not run 'software' recovery programs in this state. They cause Disk I/O read / writes, and this places increased stress on the heads, which causes errors to be written to the disk, further decreasing the chances of data recovery.