Hard drive makes discouraging sounds and prevents boot

[faithraven]

Ok so back in August 2006 I bought a 500GB Western Digital Caviar drive. Have had it running on my Asus K8V SE Deluxe motherboard for a while now.

A couple of days ago when I powered on the PC I heard the drive spinning up, make this sound that I don't really know how to describe, possibly a clicking? Then spinning down again.
Boot proceeds to the SATA controller screen where it detects and checks the array and progress is indicated by dots appearing "...", it usually takes about 3 til it proceeds with booting but since this problem it just keeps going for a few lines. While this is happening the spin-up, clicks about 3 times then spins down and repeats, over and over again.

Is the drive borked? I have tried different cables but not in a different machine yet (don't have easy access to another one with SATA atm). Is there any chance of fixing it or recovering the data? I don't have anything of tremendous personal value, mostly TV series, animé and some backed up movies, and it would take a long time to get the data back to this state again.

I have used some recovery software in the past which has been pretty successful but that relies on actually being able to boot to an OS with the drive connected .

Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

[faithraven]

Just sticks at the SATA controller drive detection screen. I havn't left it for much longer than 30 seconds since I figured I could be doing more harm leaving it cycling like that.

This is the only machine that is SATA enabled that I own but I will see if I can test it in someone else's before I contact OcUK (I assume they will replace it?).