I've browsed this board enough to know when to quit before adding costs to recovery...

It is a My Book hard drive that I took out of the USB case to plug directly in since it wasn't even powering up.
Upon powering up the drive it clicks faintly. Windows does detect the drive but can't get to a point that it can be read or assign it a drive letter.
I've tried a number of software data recovery/partition type stuff but nothing can get to the information or fix it.

What I'm looking for is a rough cost to fix worse and best case scenarios to recover data. This drive is not mine but has tons of family photos so it has some
importance to the owner.

The owner is unemployed so I need to let them no reasonably if this is something they can even afford to have fixed.

I appreciate your help. Also if you could recommend someone in this area that does this type of work I would greatly appreciate it.

This drive WD5000AAVS often has a bad PCB with symptoms like yours (clicking). Although it's not something you can fix on your own, since expensive tools are required to move the ROM information, we can definitely help recover your data affordably. If you are interested, drop us a line.

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$300 Data Recovery - Los Angeles Data Recovery

I have had success with GetDataBackNT in the case where windows can see it but reports RAW or inaccessable.

GL