Never knew floppy drives had a 'click of death' until last night

I was reading through an old forum from the 90s about a guy trying to recover data from a Zip disk. Someone mentioned the 'click of death' issue with Iomega drives and I had no idea what that meant. Turns out it was a hardware defect where the read head would crash into the disk media, making a clicking noise. I guess I just threw out any disk that made a weird sound back then. Has anyone here actually managed to fix a drive with that problem?

2 comments

2 Comments

nancys901mo ago

Had an old Zip drive that started clicking and I just took it apart carefully, cleaned the head with a q-tip and alcohol, and realigned it by hand. Worked like a charm for about another year until I finally upgraded. Not a permanent fix but got my files off which was all I cared about.

black.margaret1mo ago

Took my Zip drive apart too after it started clicking, blew out the dust and cleaned the heads with a little alcohol on a coffee filter. Got another six months out of it before I gave up and tossed it.