Hard Drive crash, really need advice

[GreenMint]

Hey there guys, hows it all going?

Got a call from my gf's uncle last night saying his pc wasn't working and wasn't sure what to do (He's 77 but pretty PC savvy) he held the phone to the pc and i could hear some MANIC clicking, when i got there today it seems the HDD is having real issues, when it detects IDE devices in the bio it takes about 2 mins, but only the DVD/RW is detected, then when it goes th where it would load windows the hard drive is making the hardcore clicking noise, very loud indeed.

The problem apparently occured when his pc was on and working fine yesterday, he went to get lunch etc.. when he came back the pc had put itself into standby, ok, no biggie, but wouldn't return from it, he's an ex-architect and stil gives many lectures and has written 4 books in the past gew years, about 95% of his stuff i helped him back up onto an external HDD and to DVD, but over the past fortnight he's written MANY presentations and didn't yet get the chance to back them up, is there ANY way at all i might stand a chance of retrieving these for him?

The only advice i have been given so far is to throw the drive in my USB 2.9 enclosure and hope it clicks itself to life then pull off what i need, is there anything else that may work?

Thanks!

 

[Explicit]

The opportunity for the first test appeared only one day after we received our copy of version 6. An 80GB hard drive on one of our busy storage servers decided to pack it in. Prior to trying SpinRite we were still able to access the drive intermittently but it was impossible to copy data or run a file undelete utility. A handful of important files had been written to the drive subsequent to the last backup the previous night; files which we needed within about 48 hours, which meant that a professional data recovery service (with its three week backlog) was out of the question. We removed the drive and installed it in an identical hardware configuration, then booted SpinRite 6 from CD and did a Level 2 recovery (see above for recovery level definitions). After 22 hours, SpinRite completed its work and pronounced the drive fully recovered. We reinstalled the drive in the original server. It ran perfectly, the research assistant who had created the required files copied them off the drive and that was that. Nice job SpinRite 6. The drive was still running fine as we went to publication with this review two weeks after the incident. We used a level 2 setting in SpinRite: Recover Unreadable Data.

http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

Chuck that on a floppy disk/CD and away you go! SpinRite will most probably fix it

 

[GreenMint]

Thanks very much indeed mate! As soon as i get home tomorrow i'll give it a go!