My hard drive was attacked by ants. Need some help to recover my files.  

andyvil I have no idea but I know someone who does and he is out of work and a computer programmer so he will be moved back into his apartment tomorrow and be back on the computer. they had fumigated my son's apartment building. Tell him his mom mrs. Hatley sent you and I do believe he can tell you exactly how to do this. He is my computer go to person and has saved me a bundle over the years.lol.tell him you are a fellow mylotter of mine. He loves to trouble shoot too.

Well by the way you describe your HD it seems to be that there might be a problem on it already. HD that have strange sounds may indicate there is physical damage on the drive already. I guess if you have a friend that is good at looking at hardware problems that might help. I may recommend some other softwares but i do not know if it will help since at many times they are destructive depending on the condition of the HD itself but if a computer technician will look into it you might be able to recover the contents of that drive safely.

The best thing to do is bring your hard disk drive to a computer expert. They will be able to tell you if it's still possible to recover your files in it or not.

Rstudio is the best software I've used for recovering files. There are also a lot of free recovery programs out there too if you like. R-studio is not a free ware though. But torrent is a very good friend.

Before you try to recover files, get another hard drive that can accommodate your recovered files. Do not run a check disk or any defragmentation tools on it. You risk losing your work if you do.

Also small clicks may mean that your drive is about to give up on you. IF you can still view your files back up it at once. If not try backing up the partition itself before you do individual file recovery. IF your hard drive finally loses it's integrity you can still recover from the partition back up you made.

IMPORTANT:

Do this only when you are really, really, really desperate:

Put your hard drive in a tightly sealed ziplock and put it in your freezer overnight. Try to wipe off the moisture from the hard drive as best as you can and connect to your computer before it cools down. The process of freezing the hard drive makes a chemical reaction and makes a dead hard drive readable. This however, is a one time big time thing. Once the hard drive refuses to display your files again, it's over for you. So make sure you back up everything when you get a chance to.

Tried this only once and my hard drive only lasted 2 days at most. Good thing all I had in it were downloaded movies and a bunch of ebooks that I really don't care for.

As I said do that only when you're desperate.

IF you're not that desperate yet 1. back up the partition or whatever is readable 2. recover individual files.

That sounds like a bloody nightmare! Are U serious?!

Wow lol that is so weird. I have never heard of ants getting into someones computer and attacked the hard drive and making it crash. I wonder what in the world they did that caused that. There is air vent holes on the side thats obivously where they crawled in. We get ants but mostly in our kitchen and they are carpenter ants.