Read this before you do anything else
Switch it off immediately. This is the worst noise a drive makes.
Grinding means physical contact between the head assembly and the platter surface while the platters are turning. It is the one noise that is actively destroying the recorded surface as you listen to it. Not risking damage, causing it. Material removed from a platter is gone, and no lab recovers what is no longer physically there. Of every symptom on this site, this is the one where the seconds genuinely count.
Emergency
Desktop hard drive grinding
If your desktop hard drive is making a grinding noise, the most useful thing on this page is above this paragraph, and it is free. What follows is what the fault usually turns out to be, how recoverable this class of failure is, and what it would cost, including the cases we would tell you to take elsewhere.
What this usually turns out to be
Inside a desktop case the grinding could be the drive, and it could just as easily be a case fan with a worn bearing, a CPU cooler, or a power-supply fan a few centimetres away. That distinction is worth thirty seconds of your time because the two outcomes could not be further apart: one is a five-dollar fan, the other is heads scraping the magnetic layer off a platter. If it is genuinely the drive, the debris that produces circulates inside the sealed chamber and damages areas that were intact when the noise started.
A bare SATA drive from a desktop. No enclosure to fail means a fault here is usually the drive itself rather than the thing it was plugged into.
Head crash
The heads have come down onto the platters and are scraping the magnetic surface away as the stack spins.
Debris circulating inside the drive
Material shed by a previous failure is being dragged between head and platter, scoring the surface on every rotation.
Collapsed bearing
The platter stack is no longer turning true, bringing the surface into the head's path.
What to check first on a desktop hard drive
- Power down, open the case, and start the machine with the drive's power lead disconnected. If the noise is still there, it is a fan and your data was never at risk.
- If the noise stops with the drive unplugged, leave it unplugged. That is your answer and it is the last thing to test.
- Note whether the drive is the boot disk, because if it is, the machine has been reading it constantly since the noise began.
What not to do
Do not run a surface scan or a manufacturer diagnostic to find out how bad it is. Those tools read the whole platter from end to end, which on a grinding drive is the maximum possible amount of contact between the heads and the surface.
How recoverable this is
The narrowest and least optimistic of any symptom here, and the fair framing is that outcome is decided largely by how long it ran making that noise. Where scoring is confined to regions your files do not occupy, recovery of the rest is realistic. Where it has cut through the area holding them, that part is not recoverable by anyone, and you should be sceptical of a lab that says otherwise.
What moves it, for your device specifically:
- How long it was left running while grinding, which is the single biggest factor
- Which regions of the surface were scored, and whether your files live there
- Whether debris has contaminated otherwise intact surfaces
We will not give you a percentage for your device, and you should be wary of anyone who does. Nobody can know what is recoverable until the media has been imaged and read. What is above describes this class of failure; your drive gets its own answer after an assessment, in writing, at no cost.
What it costs
Assessed free, then referred at no charge
Cleanroom mechanical work
Clicking, seized or head-crashed drives need internal mechanical work in a controlled environment. We don't have one, so we assess it, tell you what we found in writing, and refer it on. That referral costs you nothing here.
Nothing is charged until you have seen a fixed quote for your actual device and agreed to it, and the assessment that produces it is free.
Other faults on a desktop hard drive
Grinding or scraping on other devices
Next step
Tell us what failed.
Free assessment. Fixed quote before recovery starts. No recovery, no fee. Sydney drop-off or Australia-wide by tracked post.