3TB external not working/is clicking. How fucked am I?

So last night my 3 TB Toshiba Canvio external hard drive was working. This morning I went to the library (where I'm at right now) and went to plug it into my computer aaaand nada. My computer recognized there was something plugged in as it made that little sound when you plug in something via USB but the computer is showing the drive and on Disk Management it isn't showing up either. It was then that I noticed the clicking. My first thoughts were, "Oh God no. Please don't let that be what I think it is." I asked the tech guy at the library and he said it sounded like a messed up Read head. Is there ANY way to fix this that I can do my self? If not, can a professional fix this/recover my data? If so, how much would it cost?

If it's clicking and you're sure it's coming from the drive, then odds are no. There are professional data recovery services that should be able to recover the data off of it, but you're looking in ranges from $800-1500 depending on the service and how badly damaged your drive is.

Nope, can't afford that. It was the drive I kept all the anime & porn & hentai on I had downloaded over 8 years, plus my steam backups for over 1TB of games. I just hope I can find some torrents on nyaa that are still alive for some of those shows and for the hentai, there's e-hentai. In the mean time, I going to need to get another external hard drive.

Also, I was looking on Youtube and there seemed to be tutorials on how safely crack open and fix a stuck read header in a hard drive. First I would need figure out how to get past the housing on my external and then unstick the header.

Unless you have a cleanroom or a glovebox that you can guarantee sealed with constant positive pressure, the moment you open that drive and the platters are exposed to air particles and dust you're pretty much making a deal with the devil at that point if you don't know what you're doing.

A clicking sound from any hard drive could be a sign of imminent failure. Toshiba has a troubleshooting guide that may help you.

Portable USB Hard Drive Troubleshooting and FAQ

Or you could use SeaTools, a diagnostic utility that works on Seagate drives and non-Seagate drives.

How to use Seatools for Windows

[color=red]warning warrantly will be void when doing this
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if you have a friend who has this:


you can try to screw/open the casing from the external HDD then put the HHD of that one in the DOCK.

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if windows doesnt reconise the HDD in the dock. it could be that the controller from the HDD is broken/overcharged.

you could always try puttin it in the freezer overnight in a ziplock bag. It's stupid, and I know it's stupid, but it's know to fix SOME reader heads in hard drives. just a thought, NOT RECOMMENDING YOU TO DO IT, odds are your hard drive would be worse off with all the moisture inside

is your problem already solved, did any of the feedback help?

Have to say, this was very useful.