This hard drive came out an Acer aspire laptop and crashed a few months back (I assumed it was a windows crash until now.) I have already pulled the data from the non-OS partition several times and the drive always seemed to spin ok, etc. I got winhex and tried to use that to finally recover the C:// partition, but now having troubles. Began to recover the my documents folder and got partially through it before the hard drive began to click and sound sick (like it's finally on ultimate failure.) Now connected through USB won't read it anymore. It is still clicking (and I assume trying to spin). I am not an expert, just trying to describe best I can. What are my options? Sending it out to be recovered to the tune of $500+? Or is there any alternative I can try? Thanks in advance ...

Most likely your drive developed a scratch on a platter in the area where your OS partition is installed, which allowed you to copy other partition. By trying to pull your files from your OS partition, you forced your read/write head to go over that scratch. When your heads was going over that scratch over and over again, they simply developed more dust/scratches on a platter and heads them self. Now one or more heads seemed to be dead, that is why your drive clicks.

Unfortunately, only chance for a recovery is to send it to a pro, if recovery is still possible of course.

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www.datarecoveryne.com

I figured that. I did a little more reading after posting and realized you seem to be made up of several professionals in the data recovery field here. Does anyone have an idea as to what something like this would cost, or who can it be sent to? I don't want to go out on my own and take chances if I decide to spend the money on recovery. It's really just a personal thing at this point, I'm having trouble letting it die. Thanks!

There are a lot of good professionals around.
Where are you based?

I'm in Northeast PA, around 2 hours north of Philly.

Maybe someone near that area can point itself.