My Hard Disk Drive is making a clicking sound

The OS is Windows 7 SP1, and the drive is a Western Digital Black 1 TB HDD.

Everything was running smoothly, and then—bam!—out of nowhere, things just started crawling.
It really hit me when I opened This PC; you know that little green loading bar at the top?
Man, that thing was moving at a snail's pace! And once it finally showed all my drives,
I tried clicking on one, and... nothing. Just that same green bar staring back at me like it was struggling to load anything at all.

So, I try to reboot, right? But the system won't even start up.
And then I hear it—this weird little chirping sound coming from one of the drives. It’s not super loud, but it's definitely there.
Once I unplugged that specific drive, the system booted up perfectly fine!

I decided to hook that problematic drive up using a SATA to USB adapter.
I heard the usual "new device connected" chime.
Windows says it's installed and ready to go.

In This PC, I can see the drive, but there's a catch: it won't show the capacity
or how much space is actually being used.


I tried opening Disk Management, but it just hangs... loads and loads and... nothing. Not a single disk shows up!

Funny enough, if I open Device Manager and check the Disk Drivers, I can see all the drives listed there.


I gave it my best shot with GetDataBack for NTFS,
but it just threw an error at me saying it couldn't read the disk.

So, I moved on to try TestDisk.
Guide:

Interestingly, TestDisk actually recognized the Hard Disk Drive, its size, and the amount of occupied space!
I started the analysis, but based on my math, this thing might take about 4 days to finish. Can you believe that?


But honestly, what am I even going to get out of this analysis?
Is it worth sticking with this, or has the drive finally kicked the bucket? 🤦

Go ahead and download CrystalDiskInfo to check the S.M.A.R.T. status of your Hard Disk Drive. If you want, feel free to post a screenshot here—that way we can take a look and figure out what's actually going on...

So, I downloaded CrystalDiskInfo, got it installed, fired it up, and... nothing. That drive just wouldn't show up at all.
On my other drives, though, everything looks fine—they all show Health Status: Good.

Right around that same time, this chirping hard drive started making this increasingly loud clicking sound, and then
out of nowhere, there was this sharp noise, almost like a short circuit.
The breaker tripped and the whole system went dark.
I flipped the breaker back on, booted up the PC, and everything seems to be running normally, but I am definitely NOT
touching that drive again. I don't want to risk frying my motherboard or who knows what else! 😵

It’s fine, I guess. I mean, this is actually the first time I've had a drive die on me,
even though I have some old ones from like 15 years ago that are still spinning away.
This one was only about 4 years old, give or take. RIP. 🙂

You might want to give HDD Regenerator a shot. If that doesn't pick it up, then we're likely looking at a lost cause.
Honestly, I’m a bit stumped here—I don't quite see how a drive could just trip a circuit breaker. All these components run on such low voltage, and the power supply itself is designed to act as a buffer. It might be worth double-checking your PSU, specifically to see if that connector hooked up to the drive is actually delivering the correct voltages.

Looks like my cheap SATA to USB power adapter just kicked the bucket.
I tried plugging it into a different drive and still nothing—not even a little light blinking on the thing.


The power supply itself seems fine, though. I took the connector I was using for that clicking hard drive
and hooked it up to another drive, and it works perfectly! So, the power is good, right?

Anyway, I got the hard drive reconnected, and here is what CrystalDisk is showing me.


I tried to initialize the drive in Disk Management, but it just failed. It keeps throwing an error at me.


I've only got the demo version of HDD Regenerator, but hey, at least it actually recognizes the drive!

So, once you open up HDD Regenerator, there are all these different options available,
but honestly, I have no clue which one I should even try.
It says that with this demo version, I can only fix the very first
bad physical sector on the drive.

An I/O error basically means the system just can't reach it. You might want to try swapping out the SATA cable, plugging it into a different SATA port, or—better yet—testing the drive on another computer altogether to see if it behaves there.
If we're looking at bad sectors, HDD Regenerator could potentially fix them quite easily—though you won't get very far with just the demo version. Give it a quick search online; you should be able to find the full version, and if I recall correctly, it used to be included as one of those extra repair tools on Hiren's BootCD. Just a heads-up, though—repairing those sectors takes time. On a 1TB HDD, we could be talking about several days of waiting, and even then, there's absolutely no guarantee it’ll actually work. Oh, and yeah, I know HDD Regenerator has a few other features besides sector repair, but my memory is failing me on the specifics right now. Let me know if you manage to track down the full version!

So, I finally picked up a registered version of HDD Regenerator.
The drive shows up fine, so I went ahead and tried option number 1,
but then I got hit with this: Master Boot Record of this hard drive is damaged!



Then I grabbed the free version of AOMEI Partition Assistant to see if I could just 'fix' the MBR (Master Boot Record).
It actually said it worked! Success, right?



But wait—I jump back into HDD Regenerator and... nope, same old story.
Master Boot Record of this hard drive is damaged!
At least the program keeps running, though.





Look, I’m definitely no expert at this kind of stuff, but if this thing is still sitting at 0.00% after an entire hour, am I just chasing my tail here? It feels like this could go on forever and I might end up with nothing. From what I can tell, it hasn't fixed a single one of those 12 bad sectors it flagged.

I’ve already swapped out the cable and even tried a different SATA port, but no luck—same result.
When the SATA-to-USB adapter was working properly, I plugged it into my laptop,
and wouldn't you know it? Still the exact same issue.

Before all this, I tried booting into Safe Mode, and when I checked Disk Management, it says the drive is in RAW format? 🤔
It's been over an hour and fifteen minutes now, and the processing is still stuck at 0.00%. Honestly, I don't think this is going to work. 🤷

So, here’s the deal—the Master Boot Record is basically just a table containing all your partition data, sitting right there on that very first sector of the drive. In your case, that specific part is corrupted, which is exactly why the disk isn't readable. Now, normally you could just use a few tools to fix it (like you already tried), but there's an extra layer of trouble here: the sector where the MBR lives is actually a bad sector. That’s the kicker. It means any attempt at a repair fails because the system simply can't read from or write to that spot. The whole idea behind using HDD Regenerator was—if luck was on your side—to somehow patch up that exact sector so you could finally get in there and fix the MBR. You shouldn't even have to wait for the entire scan to finish, since that sector is right at the beginning; a few hours should tell you everything you need to know. But honestly, if it hasn't managed to fix any of those 12 bad sectors by now, that's probably not a great sign.
If you ask me? My advice is to consider that drive officially retired. Even if you do manage to limp it back to life, you can never, ever trust it again—maybe fine for some unimportant files, but that's about it.
Now, I'm really not sure whether the data on there is absolutely vital to you, or if you're just trying to salvage the hardware itself.
One possibility is cloning the entire drive onto a new one. There are specialized tools designed to perform sector-by-sector copies, which would create an identical clone—errors and all. However, since the sectors on the new drive will be physically healthy, you might then be able to successfully repair the MBR and actually get to your files. Take a look at ddrescue if you want to dive down that rabbit hole. Generally speaking, I suspect you'd have much better luck trying to access the drive through Linux.
Theoretically—and this is a bit of a long shot—you could try mapping the damaged drive and marking that initial section as unusable. If you then cloned it back, you might force the system to use a different sector for the MBR. I've never actually pulled this off myself, though, so I couldn't tell you if it's even doable.
At the end of the day, you'll have to weigh how important that data really is, because all of this could easily turn into a massive exercise in futility. Good luck!

So, I finally pulled the plug on that whole HDD Regenerator operation,
it flagged 73 bad sectors and wouldn't fix a single one of them. 🤦
Yeah, that whole Linux route was definitely an option too, just like cloning the entire drive.
I actually dug up some tutorials on it. Downloaded all the tools and stuff, but then... nothing. Just sat there.
Honestly, the drive itself isn't a huge deal, and the data on it isn't exactly irreplaceable.
Mostly just some music, mostly MP3 files, a few TV series and movies I've finished.
It would be awesome if I could get it back, but why spend endless hours and effort on
something with such an uncertain outcome? Better to just let it go for now and maybe try again down the road
using that cloning method with Linux.
Anyway, thanks so much for the ideas and all the help! 👍