Hard drive making scraping noises

[wolfpack103]

Hello. Today I was cleaning my parents little storage crawl space area and I found an old laptop. I decided to boot it up to see if it still worked. It said that there was no bootable device. In the BIOS settings the drive was not detected. The laptop was making weird clicking/scraping noises on the HDD. I took the hard drive out and plugged it into my pc and it was making the same noises. Since this was from an older laptop and I did check with my parents and they said they didn't want it or care about the data on the drive. So considering that I opened up the drive and everything looked normal. I saw a few videos on Youtube about a clicking hard drive and how to fix it but they all had the read write head still on the platter when the drive was off. The hard drive I have had the header not on the hard drive when it was off. I am aware the risk of taking apart the hard drive and the data loss that could happen. Was wondering how I could fix the drive myself. I know that I shouldn't do this and I should have data recovery professionals working on the drive but my parents and I don't care about the data that is on it. Just thought  it would be a fun little project to do in quarantine. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

[LunaP0n3]

Fixing the drive yourself is not an option. Period.
The drives are hermetically sealed with good reason to prevent dust from completely killing a drive. As the read write heads hover nano-meters over the disk surface, they are precision devices, and you require special tools, training, apparel and a dust free cleanroom to service a drive.

Opening up a drive outside of a cleanroom allows dust to fall on the disk surface, no matter how clean you may think your room is.

[wolfpack103]

4 minutes ago, LunaP0n3 said:

Fixing the drive yourself is not an option. Period.
The drives are hermetically sealed with good reason to prevent dust from completely killing a drive. As the read write heads hover nano-meters over the disk surface, they are precision devices, and you require special tools, training, apparel and a dust free cleanroom to service a drive.

Opening up a drive outside of a cleanroom allows dust to fall on the disk surface, no matter how clean you may think your room is.

Yeah I'm aware that you would need a clean room for the data to not be altered by the dust and everything else. I'm just curious on how to get the header back into position to read and write correctly.

[LunaP0n3]

2 minutes ago, wolfpack103 said:

Yeah I'm aware that you would need a clean room for the data to not be altered by the dust and everything else. I'm just curious on how to get the header back into position to read and write correctly.

Clicking usually indicates that the drive can't lock on to the data on the disk, so it retries several times before giving up.

The disk surface or the head has likely gone bad preventing you from fixing it at your end.

Short version, the drive is dead, and you can't fix it.

Opening it up to retrieve the magnet for the head might be something you can do though. There's a neodymium magnet in there as part of the head mechanism that tend to be pretty strong.