You may want to give flts' method a try. What have you got to lose?

 

Just curious as to why you are using a hard dive for back up instead of some version of a cloud, e.g., Carbonite or Mozy. I use them for all my files, both personal and business, and it gives me ubiquitous access from my lap top no matter where I am. The cost is minimal if indeed you have documents that are important

 

I don't store a lot of stuff on my computer and this was an external hd that I used to back up my address book. Pictures, etc. are stored at an online site. I plugged the hd in to extract some old stuff and heard a mechanical clicking noise and the computer would not recognize the drive. That's when I knew it was probably shot. I wanted to extract the address book but could not. It is not a biggy, I was just hoping someone had a magical way of retrieving it. I have a tool but it isn't working either.

 

How long has Jim been retired?

 

This is often referred to as "hard drive head stiction", where the read/write heads of the drive get stuck on the platters of the drive. Just be careful how you "whack" the drive, do not whack it in the direction that would cause the heads to bounce off the platters (i.e., do not whack on the "flat" sides of the drive). Always whack from the side so the heads can slide off the platters and not bounce on them. Good luck.