Hard Drive Failure & Data Recovery

I have an old [Hitachi] TravelStar laptop hard-drive (30GB, manufactured 09/2003) that just died on me. The drive was used for external storage purposes only and originally was part of an IBM T23 laptop setup (also dead). It was making clicking sounds and now won't let WindowsXP recognize the drive contents. There aren't any critical files on the drive, but it would be nice to be able to recover some of the files.

Short of sending it out for professional recovery, is there anything I can do to try and recover the data myself?

Thanks for your help.

 

As the drive was clicking, other than getting an identical hard drive, and changing the discs inside, my thoughts are that the last resort trick might just do it, but it sounds a bit ludicrous ( has been used by many , and with some succes)
Put your hard drive in an antustatic bag, wrap in a dry teatowel, and put it in the freezer overnight !
In the morning, remove from the freezer, carefully remove the teatowel, and leave in the antistatic bag, for about 10 minutes, then remove the hard drive, and attatch to your host (another computer),and if you are lucky, and it spins up, immediately copy the files you want to the host computer/usb, whatever.
If it works, you have only probably the one chance for it to spin up, so prepare for it (another computer/laptop/ usb drive caddy), and somewhere to save it.
By all means try other software, but having had this problem many times, this is the last resort trick!

 

Thanks! I'll give your suggestion a try.

 

Good luck- let us know how you get on.