I am seeking some help on my Maxtor 3200 personal storage USB hard drive.

It began acting strangely last Friday. When I tried to open a folder using Windows Explorer (Win XP), the explorer just stop responding, and the Windows won't shut down. I tried with disconnecting the USB cable, then windows would shut down properly. Then I re-connected the USB cable to the hard drive(HD), the computer won't boot up (just blank screen, no bios info). Then I disconnected and reconnected the power to the HD, the computer would boot up normally and I could access the HD using Windows Explorer.

Then on Saturday, the HD seemed to pass away. I tried to disconnect the power etc. It just wouldn't show up in Windows XP. So I tried to boot up on Magic Disk and run MHDD, scan, the computer just hang up again. No single block is displayed after entering the SCAN screen.

I then tried with Prosoft Data Rescue. It found the HD quite quickly (instantly). But then it showed that about 10000 hours is needed to finish scanning the 500G HD. It took about 3 hours to scan the first 140M or so before telling me that sector "***4" has read error. So I quit and tried with cloning the HD. Again it took several hours to copy some 140M before telling me it found some bad sector. I tried to clone with some different starting LBA, the speed were also very slow--about 1M per minute.
I placed the HD by my ear, I can hear "da...dadada" about once every four seconds. The light in front of it is constantly on, not blinking at all even when it is being cloned. The clicking sound was there even when it is not being cloned. The sound is not very loud--when the HD is under the desk and I was sitting, I had to pay attention to notice the sound.

I've got the drive for about 6 months. It is still under warranty. The data is not critical, but I would still like to recover some of it before sending it back for replaement. Any suggestion will be highly appreciated.

what you can hear is beep beep coming from the drive itself.

nothing electronic making that noise

its possible a motor fail or bearing or the head itself is stuck

mostly all maxtors have this problem
any drives that beep beep its time to return or remove it from use

Bad sectors, weak head or poor mechanic. The drive is failing. If don't want to send to a pro (we 'pros' have specialized HW tools for imaging) it may fail at anytime when imaging but do it yourself at no cost.
For me there's no quick solution.

Last week I recovered successfully a 120GB disk that was going to die but with specialised tool and keeping the drive constantly at fixed temperature - cool -.
With specialised tool the entire process took about 16 hrs. while "magic" softwares (that won't get the data on bads) should take.. yes, over 10.000 hours.