i opened up my disk can clearly see the needle tripping out, clicking and grinding noises, yet I can see unallocated space in my disk manager.. Im trying to create a raw image, see screenshot, and fml

... Why the hell did you open your hard drive? Wouldn't that KILL the drive?!

131071 TB? The hell?

Opening an HDD just like that exposes it to dust and normal atmosphere, which is quite amusing for the aerodynamic magnetic heads - the disk spins so fast, there's a strong wind blowing along the surface even in low-pressure sealed conditions.

And when you say "opened up", what do you mean, exactly?

Yes, they do. That's why they're called "hard disk drives", because they are spinning dis(c|k)s read by read/write heads moving very close the surface (so close that a single piece of dust or a human hair would severely damage them, as both have a thickness several times the distance between platter and head).

I'm guessing it was doing that even before he opened it and/or the disc was made unreadable by whatever caused it.

To OP: Sorry to tell you this but it seems the drive is toast...and unless you can cough up the dough to recover the data you might as well trash it for a new one. Hope you didn't have any valuable files on there. :(

Are you saying you physically opened the hard drive to look inside? If so, the hard drive is trash now. The smallest amounts of dust will cause a head crash, doing irreparable damage to the platter.

Clicking and grinding means the drive has or will very soon completely fail.

The clicking is it hitting the read/write heads against something, the grinding is the motor trying to move the heads after it has already hit them against something (stalled heads). It's even possible that the grinding noise is being caused by the heads actually moving across a damaged surface (which may be imperceivable to the eye).

If you can still read from the drive at all, you will need a tool like ddrescue which will read the good sectors into an image, which you can then run something like testdisk (photorec) on to possibly recover files.

However, opening it up has significantly reduced that chance as you've likely contaminated the platters with dust.

I actually did this to one of my drives by knocking it over while it was in its enclosure and being accessed. The head crashed into the platter and completely trashed it, but it looked perfectly fine to the eye.

I don't know the case in the states and Canada, but around here it is starting to get relatively affordable even for individuals to get professional data recovery help. I mean, $1000 isn't all too much if that data really is important and irreplaceable (of course, a backup is cheaper, but there's not much to be done when the damage is already done).

This is why I wish SSD would become more popular/cheaper. So many problems with HDDs currently available. (I know SSDs have problems too but no mechanical problems like with standard HDDs afaik.)

Yeah, no moving parts, but instead limited writes.

Oh well. Like I said, I have no experience with computer machinery other than playing with software. I don't think I've ever heard the "Disk" part included when someone mentions the hard drive though.

I hear tell that newer SSDs have lifespans comparable to current HDDs......who knows what the future may bring?

I don't use it either, to be honest, but that's what HDD is short for.