The click of death.

I have in my hand a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500 Gig drive. Yesterday I heard a noise, I though to myself, "Humm wonder where that relay is?" I quickly realized it was one of my drives. I pulled the side of the case as it continued more frequently. With my hand laying on each drive a Intel X25 SSD (Can't click,) Hitachi 2 Tb X2 and this Seagate. Before I could tell which one it was I decided to start backing up. The Hitachis are clones of each other so I wasn't worried about them, so I set off copying the 200 Gig or so off the Seagate. and got about 200 meg into it and she locked up. Had to hard restart the computer. The Seagate no longer showed up in Windows. So I Booted to puppy linux, still not there. Then looked in the Bios, yep she was gone. I pulled it and in my hand it isn't even spinning, you know, the gyro feeling. My last backup was on Oct 8, 2010 so that's not to bad and there was never the 'important stuff' on this one anyway.
I know all the stories about the firmware problems with the Seagates and all the 'fixes' I also tried the freezer (never fully understood that one) but is it safe to say I can now open it up to get the magnets or there some trick I don't know about to help a drive that isn't showing up in the Bios?

 

Even if it is out of warranty, I would explain your problem to Seagate's customer service and see if they could compensate you in any way. Companies are pretty good at helping the customer.

 

Agreed with tgell: I've never worked with Seagate support, but Western Digital once gave me an out of date RMA because I proved my past value as a customer.

Hearkens back to the old Freon trick: we used to spray Freon on integrated circuits as a troubleshooting procedure - the circuit board would be dead, but when the cold Freon hit the right IC, the board would fire up, thus pinpointing the culprit.
I'd imagine the 'freezer trick' is roughly similar, in that the cold might temporarily 'fix' a problem.