Need Help Diagnosing Hardware Problem With External Hard Drive

Hi guys and girls. I have an external hard drive that stop working but it has a lot of important stuff on it so I am hoping I can repair it. When I plug it into a computer I get the chime from computer that a usb device was connected but no drive shows up on computer. I can see USB mass storage device appear in device manager but that is it. I've narrowed it down to some kind of hardware problem. The hard drive makes a clicking noise for about 3 seconds when first plugged in then it goes quiet. I don't know the correct terminology so bare with me but I did some googling it suggested the "needle" may be stuck on the "disc". I opened it up and it was sitting on the disc. I carefully moved it back into place. However, once I reassembled it and plugged into computer, still no luck reading the drive. Any guidance on checking the hardware components would be greatly appreciated. Also, how tight should the screw be that holds down this "needle"? It seemed loose but I don't know what it's supposed to feel like or how this needle is supposed to go over or on the disc. I don't know how a working hard drive operates so I'm just guessing here in the hopes I can get it to work long enough to recover my files.

 

Needle? No.

Clicking typically indicates the read/write head is banging into the end-stops in an attempt to find the data it is seeking. It can mean corrupt data, or impending drive failure.

You should never, as in NEVER EVER open up a drive. The platters (the actual disks data is stored on) are manufactured and assembled in a "clean room" like this:
http://www.willcleanroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/cleanroom-520x292.jpg
This is necessary because just one spec of dust can cause corruption. The greater the density (higher capacity drives), the more corruption any contamination can cause.

You may have doomed any attempt to recover any data.

What you need to do is attach that drive directly to another computer as a secondary drive (this may require an inexpensive adapter) or install it into another enclosure, then attempt to recover any data with a data recovery program like Recuva from the makers of CCleaner or Wise Data Recovery.

If the data is valuable to you, you might consider a data recovery service but note they can be very expensive costing $100s or even $1000s - depending on the size of the drive and the amount of data.