Twitching Hard Drive Corpse...

Here is an inside view of a dead hard drive. Likely the driver board has lost its mind...

They could call the band " The Hard Drive Click of Death " ?

It was the most common failure with the older Western Digital IDE drives. Didn't see it all that much with the Seagates,Maxtors, or Hitachis. Seemed to be a W.D. thing.

The arm controller has to be able to track the position of the arm as it's floating across the platter. When it gets confused it brings the arm back to the park position and starts again. Just keeps making the same cycle over and over again. That's what gives you the click of death.

No easy fix for it. A lot of the time the problem was somewhere in the logic board. Other times it was due to a head crash into the platter.Either way you would probably have to send it out to a good data recover lab for repair.

Don't see that problem as much with the newer SATA drives. It's more cyclic redundancy check errors and bad sectors on the platter these days. The new solid state drives may get around that problem because they don't have any moving parts to get messed up.