I had an old one with an intermittent spindle failure. I managed to get back into it temporarily with the freezer trick. I don't know if that actually worked or I just got lucky with the spindle bearing after moving it around or what, but I've had to learn the hard lesson multiple times now that anything worth keeping is worth backing up to an alternate location, like another hard drive or online storage.

Does it make any noise? If it makes any noise beside a constant clicking noise, it might still be possible to save some files using a recovery program.

It is trying to do that revving sound but that is partial, like 'vnn-vnn-vnn' before it then beeps sharply and stops.

Does this sound like your problem?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m5cil6KezI

God have mercy. I'm cringing so hard at this video. In general, do NOT expect an opened hard drive to work again, it's a complete gamble.
He does sort of mention that at the end of the video, but he goes back and forth constantly "it's perfectly okay to do this," "but don't ever use it for a primary drive, just use it as a backup of a backup, I don't trust it after it's been opened."

I mean, it's solid advice for an amateur. There are a lot of way human error can go catastrophically bad here. I wouldn't want to touch the head without extreme care, and touching the platter is basically a death sentence. That said, I've been in a position where I've had to operate on a few hard drives in the past, and desperate people do desperate things. I got my data back, for that I'm grateful.

My biggest gripe with it is the risk involved, really. Given the huge likelihood of something going wrong, I'd rather not see such risky things advocated and advertised without the appropriate boilerplate disclaimers, which I feel like this guy kinda glossed over with noncommittal and somewhat wishy-washy statements.

But, yeah, at the end of the day, the drive owner is free to do whatever they'd like with it. If this works (which, there's no reason it shouldn't), then more power to them.

Ohh that sucks. It sucks in dimensions that reads coconuts through a straw.

No matter if clicking noise or not there could be a way to get it running. I was able to get access to the drive completely in 80% of all failed drives by simply swapping the controller circuit of the HDD.

That means you would have to obtain a working drive of the same brand and fabrication date usually you can unscrew the controller board of those drives and swap em. At times it is just a heat induced come lose welding spot or anything.

Also as a meaning of storing data. NEVER go single drive. Invest some into a at least 3 bay NAS drive and run it in a RAID 5 Array. That way one drive can go faulty and you still got all data.

It is an ex-hard drive?

And yes, as Foxy stated above, try to keep multiple backups. Say to the external hard drive and also to another machine/laptop/dropbox/whatever.

Yeah, an external one.

That was me being a bit "Monty Python" parrot sketch-esque. :) "It has ceased to be! It is an ex-parrot!"

External drives sometimes fail because they have a secondary controller. You can take the hard drive out of its enclosure and plug it in to your computer like a regular drive if the USB controller fails. I'm not aware of any that make a specific noise when they fail, but there are a lot of externals manufacturers who do silly things with their drives.

Do the freezer trick. It might save you.

I've had 3 external hard drives fail but my 8 year old and tiny hard drive still works fine.

It's like flipping a coin if you get a good one or a bad one.

Yeah, quality has gone severely downhill in the last several years. Old PATA Seagates used to be invincible, now I wouldn't recommend Seagate to anyone. WD, conversely, used to be an absolute crapshoot, but now they're somewhat reliable. Overpriced to hell, though, so I still have a hard time recommending them.

Considering you can't hear any clicking from the drive, I wonder if it's more the enclosure that's given up the ghost, and not the drive itself..
Gotta remember that external hard drives are just an internal hard drive + an enclosure (often overpriced, imo) that gives it power and lets it talk over USB/eSATA/Whatever.

So it may not be that challenging to recover what's on it, after all.

Also, as for the freezer trick, I've only ever heard it mentioned re: li-ion batteries, but that sounds like a great way to get condensation. I wouldn't do it until you've popped open the enclosure and tried directly hooking up the drive, personally.

I've tried to plug it in directly, still didn't work properly. Did the same short winding up noise few times before then just making one sharp-ish beep and stopping.

Damn. :/ Well, go for broke, I guess.

As for backups, not sure how much space you'd need, but (as much as I hate my bosses throwing it around like a buzzword) throwing stuff into the cloud is one of the safest bets you can take - given you don't ever lose internet access, I guess?
Google hands out 15gb for free along with every google account made, and I'm pretty sure that's the best free option out there. Haven't looked in a while, but I know dropbox still only gives you 2gb (and they've done some shady shit in the past, so I'm not fond of them.)

mine just died too. it sucks.

I actually pulled one of my hdds that was doing that apart and waggled the head around (normally an incredibly stupid idea, but I wasn't going to lose anything at that point if it broke further since I already lost it) and...that fixed it long enough to let me pull all the data off...probably not a brilliant idea but its my 2 cents.