This is an unfortunate case; It sounds to me less like a spindle problem (maybe the spindle took some damage but is still good enough) but certainly a head problem; the "beep" sound is likely the heads touching the platter surface breifly. Avoid running the drive at all until you can afford to send it in for recovery.


As far as WD drives go, they are among the hardest to perform physical work on because of the head-stack.

For performance, WD is very high, somehow their drives always seem to put out great performance numbers (I especially like their newer 640GB AAKS drive), which i use myself. But an important thing to keep in mind, and this is with any hard drive, but especially WD drives, is to always keep a backup of you important data, either burn some dvds and put them away somewhere sage, or if you have too much data for that, get a good enclosure that is run in a "Raid 1" or "mirrored array"; this wont save you if you drop the enclosure, but it will save you if the backup drive inside fails, because the backup has a backup.


I hope you can get around to getting the data recovered one day, and as rchadwick said; the older this series gets most likely newer techniques will be found, or the techniques in place will become easy after many recoveries, and prices will drop.