Hi!

I am Uros from Slovenia-small country in Europe. One guy told me about that, when I was searching for info about Maxtor 500 GB.

I have 2x Maxtor 500 GB SATA2 (6H500F0 DiamondMax11), and one of them started to making noises - the same as I read on this page:
http://datacent.com/maxtor_data_recovery.php?hdd=Maxtor&model=Grizzly



It is sad, because I have 300 GB of videos, music and pictures there I would like to recover. When I start the computer, hard disc starts making noises and it is like that for 30 seconds, then it is quiet, but bios says there is an error on disc drive and Windows recognizes it as unreadable and as "Maxtor Grizzly".

In one moment it happened that I was turning the disc in my hand and the bios recognized it and I was able to copy at last almost all pictures from it (for about 1 hour it was working and copying), but then suddenly sounds appeared again. Since that time I can not repeat that moment, that BIOS would recognize it. Is there any advice from you what I can try to get the data? If I try to upgrade firmware I will probably loose the data on it?

The guy from the datacent.com website also suggested to put the drive in a freezer for a few moments and try again. But in case it won't help I should try to change the heads with the drive that works. Is there anybody from Slovenia who have already tried that?

It's very unlikely this is a firmware issue. Most likely heads... Firmware upgrade will not work for sure.
Another 500GB Maxtor you have should be a good donor for a headswap.
Read this article - it will help you understand some basic things about head swap.
But I wouldn't recommend you try it by yourself without any experience, most likely you will fail...

Before trying headswap try to swap a PCB from the donor. Sometimes clicking can be caused by bad PCB. If this doesn't help - try to play with the bad drive: try to start it on the side, upside-down, put it into freezer for few minutes... The fact that it was able to start eventually is a good sign, maybe it will start up once more - enough to copy remaining data.