>>3652090Clicking?? It could be the hard drive "click of death".
I've had that happen to some hard drives of mine, most recently a Toshiba hard drive.
https://acsdata.com/hard-drive-click-of-death/Each hard drive manufacturer has their own diagnostics software, so consider searching for the manufacturer (such as
Seagate) and then
diagnostics software download.
I wanted to return the Toshiba because it was getting slow in reading/writing files and was making that clicking noise while starting up, but S.M.A.R.T. wouldn't report any faults. (This is done on purpose by cheapass hard drive manufacturers - especially on their consumer models, to prevent warranty returns.)
So I downloaded the Toshiba software, hoping that it would find a fault, but instead, it did something to the hard drive (while I was running several diagnostic scans) which "fixed" the problem. Now I don't trust that stupid hard drive anymore, and can't return it either, but that's another subject.
A decent S.M.A.R.T. tool is CrystalDiskInfo, BTW:
https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/If the motor has indeed failed, you could try putting the hard drive into an external case. As the hard drive motor tries to start up, horizontally rotate the case quite intensively (being careful not to pull the cables out), as that might rotate the platters into another position, where the motor is better able to start them rotating.
I was once able to get an ancient "frozen" hard drive running again that way, so that I was able to copy the data off before binning it.
