Dropped, then clicking. A Seagate Expansion recovered anyway.

The drive had been dropped. Afterwards it wasn't recognised by any computer, and it made clicking sounds each time it spun up.

Clicking has more than one possible cause — a known Seagate firmware issue is one — but a drive that has just been dropped and starts clicking points straight at physical damage. Diagnosis confirmed it: the impact had damaged the drive's read/write heads.

That is a mechanical fault, not something a format, a recovery app or a computer repair shop can fix. It needs the drive opened under cleanroom conditions and the heads replaced with a matching donor set — which is exactly what we did.

Seagate drives are known to be particular about donor heads — a near-enough match is not good enough, and finding a correct donor is often the hardest part of the job. With a good working Seagate donor identified, the drive was opened in our cleanroom and the damaged heads replaced.

The swap took around two hours in the cleanroom. It went well: the drive became stable once the new heads were fitted, and stayed stable long enough to image the full 2TB.

There were a number of bad sectors from the impact of the drop, which is typical once a drive has been dropped hard enough to damage its heads. None of them stood in the way of getting the data off — the image completed cleanly around them.

The school's data was recovered from the drive. Head replacements like this are specialist work with a real cost attached — Seagate head swaps typically run from around £250 to £400 depending on the drive model — but it is the only route back once heads are physically damaged.

If your Seagate Expansion, or any external hard drive, has started clicking since a knock or a drop, power it down and stop using it. See how we approach hard drive data recovery generally, or get a straight assessment of your own drive.