I was at a client's this very morning who uses Zips to backup to... and
sure enough. click.....click.....click.... backup failed. I said
click-of-death-use-usb-sticks-instead before the final click....
I've had success with repairing the directories on disks destroyed by
'click death' drives. I'd tried reformatting the disks on Win95 and 98
machines but the format utility (even long format with verify) gives up
too quickly and reports the disk is either locked or damaged. Scandisk
refuses to even look at the disks and reports there is something wrong
with them.
Using the Win3.1 guiutil.exe on an old 486, I was able to reformat
the disks and they now work fine on all the various machines I've tried
them on. This may work with internal drives too but I use my good
external parallel drive and click on the drive icon and select format from
the menu. When the disk starts to click, press eject and a message will
appear that the disk has a format and would you like to continue
formatting with verify.
Re-inject the disk, select continue and the format/verify will run for
9 minutes and 27 seconds, successfully repairing the disk every time I've
tried it this way (I've repaired 23 disks so far by this method including
a couple my friend was ready to throw out as he had tried just about
everything - even a Mac). Scandisk will even verify the disk is fine and
I've had no further problems with any of the disks repaired in this
manner. Is the older version a better program? I think it's that the
Win3.1 guiutil.exe doesn't scrutinize the disks as much as the later
versions do and simply does the deed, which is the best way.
This method shouldn't work either but it does. Give it a try before
heaving your disks. I constantly use the repaired disks and have never
had a repeat failure with them.
Note: There is no guarantee that every drive or disk can be repaired as
described above. Some drives or disks may be too badly trashed.
Download guiutil.exe at ...
http://apple2.org.za/gswv/a2zine/Utils/ClickOfDthFix_guiutil.zip
As for the drives themselves, it's been noted that the guide rails that
the head travels on dry out and with some good lube, fixes the problem.
When the rails dry out, the head stops prematurely and creates a new track
0 in an incorrect location, not being to reach fully back to the proper
track 0 thus the drive clicks repeatedly, attempting to reach the original
track 0. Lubing should fix this problem.