drive won't show up and making clicking sound

"Sadly, it likely is.

Here's a nice YouTube on what it looks like inside: How To Repair WD Clicking HDD?. Frankly this guy is trying to scare up some business with this vid.

In any case don't open it up like he did as you will make things much worse!

You need a clean room and very special tools to repair the drive if it can be. Often the heads snap off from a sharp bang. Think how a phonograph works with a record when you hit it you kill the record as the needle scratches it. A HD is no different, if you banged it you kill it. Data recovering services charge a lot so hopefully you have a backup.

Heres the WD TN on the causes: WD external hard drive makes a repeated clicking sound"

"I just had a 2.5"" wd blue 500G drive die on my wife's Lenovo. The HDD make repeated clicking/chattering noises and for all intents and purposes was dead. I put the drive into the second sata bay of my Clevo laptop and windows disk manager showed it was recognized as a drive but could not register or access any volumes. This told me it most likely wasn't the HDD's circuit board.

Im pretty gifted at fixing things so with nothing to lose I removed the HDD's cover which revealed the platters. I noticed the head was parked in the middle of the platter. Very carefully I swung the head assembly back to its power off position. I buttoned everything back up, powered it on and to my suprise it was working!!! I scanned the disk for errors and none were found. Even though I had an incredible stroke of luck Im taking no chances, Im making recovery discs and will probably install a SSD."

Had the same issue with one of my Passports. Remembered having the same symptoms with the old iPod drives before they went solid-state. Old school lo-tech fixes sometimes just work. Tried utilities, web searches, youtube , different computers and ports. Finally just rapped the POS sharply on an edge against a counter, just like the old iPod. Spun right up with no clicking when I connected it. Copying the data elsewhere since it's likely to occur again. Before the trolls start flaming me... it worked. Argue with that. When you have a dead drive and no other recourse what have you got to lose?

I have a lot of WD drives, I'm a Vietnam based photographer and I use them to store my work on. I travel regularly for work so I keep three copies of every drive so that I can travel with two drives and leave one behind in case I get robbed while I am travelling. When all three drives are full I send the third drive back to my home country of Australia in case something happens to my drives in Vietnam. I have been using WD drives since 2012 and I now have 24 drives in total. In the past six months I've had this happen twice so I am thankful that I always keep backups of everything. On a side note I sync the backups using a program called Cronosync which syncs all new and updated files automatically at the click of a button. Anyway luckily both of effected drives where still under warranty when it happened and both where backed up onto other copies. WD replaced the drives within a few days of me notifying them of the problem as well. So for anyone whom does have a backup (and anything important should be backed up) then this is the best way to fix the problem. Just get onto the WD website and log into the my support section. Notify them of the problem and the drive will be replaced.

"Don't rush throwing it away.

My oldest WD internal drive is 14 yo and all of a sudden it started clicking loudly and shutdown itself after 30sec. Removing the data cable as WD suggest didn't help. A guy from recovery services said, if it's spinning, 99.9% it's not the PCB.

My HDD never fell, nor got a physical damage. Could be heads calibration issue or a damaged Service Area that stores manufacture data required for HDD operation.

I thought of opening and inspecting the heads and platters (drive has no critical data on it), pulled the HDD out and while holding it bottom up connected it to the power. Surprisingly, the gravitational force made the trick with the heads! The HDD started spinning without clicking. Holding in this position, I connected the data cable, opened the Device Manager and performed a Scan for HW changes. The drive was detected and showed in Windows. I copied all the needed files, except two that failed reading at 95% due to bad sectors. Copied those using Roadkil's Unstoppable Copier. It took two days to copy while HDD is in bottom up position.

Hope this helps someone."

"I just got one brand new for christmas and it was making a horrible clicking noise like it was killing itself every second.

I found out that plugging it in directly to my laptop solved the problem. Previously I had it plugged in to the splitter built into my Mac keyboard, maybe it wasn’t getting enough power? Now I’m just concerned that the sound it was making may have screwed something up :\"