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Last week my HDD apparently died. I could neither boot nor even read it when booting a live debian distro. When powering up the HDD, it makes the following sound:

I also tried to connect it as an external HDD and dmesg reported the following:

[114817.677736] usb 1-2: new high-speed USB device number 8 using xhci_hcd
[114817.807355] usb 1-2: New USB device found, idVendor=152d, idProduct=2338
[114817.807361] usb 1-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=5
[114817.807364] usb 1-2: Product: USB to ATA/ATAPI Bridge
[114817.807366] usb 1-2: Manufacturer: JMicron
[114817.807368] usb 1-2: SerialNumber: 152D203380B6
[114817.808377] usb-storage 1-2:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[114817.808568] scsi12 : usb-storage 1-2:1.0
[114818.806902] scsi 12:0:0:0: Direct-Access                                    PQ: 0 ANSI: 2 CCS
[114818.807114] sd 12:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0
[114818.808349] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdc] Test WP failed, assume Write Enabled
[114818.808787] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdc] Asking for cache data failed
[114818.808790] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
[114818.811560] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI disk

I even tried dd if=/dev/sdc of=./sample bs=100M count=1 to see if I could read anything, but the resulting file was completely empty. Needless to say, no partitions are recognized at all and I cannot even format it.

Are these indicating a dead hard drive or is there any hope of being able to retrieve anything from it? Thankfully, I don't have anything of high importance to be retrieved.

The HDD was a 1000GB Seagate, bought in 2012.

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That is the "click of death".

Aside from the off-chance it may start working if the drive electronics are replaced with a PCB from an IDENTICAL drive, the drive is dead -- replace it.

Some related SU questions you may want to check out:

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    Yes, indeed. Upvote. I always like to say that hard drives are like light bulbs: Whenever you turn one on be ready to say goodbye. But for me that's just a minor annoyance because I keep good backups. Another thing I like to say is that the best backup for a hard drive is another hard drive.
    – SDsolar
    May 12, 2017 at 17:29
  • @Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 Thank you very much for the answer and the links, I actually wanted additional information to get insight understanding. :)
    – Adama
    May 13, 2017 at 9:09

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