Hello to anyone who's interested!

I have a faulty drive here with a bunch of un-backedup uni work on it. The guy dropped his laptop when it was on so the data is pretty damn important but I need to make the decision of whether to tell him he's got to pay to send it to a lab or take the lid off and have a go myself (an area where I have extremely limited experience).

When I first received it I powered it up and saw that Windows detected it as a drive but couldn't do anything with it. It would spin for a while then make a clunk and then a slight downspin noise would occur but then it went back up to speed.
Sometimes I could GetDataBack to see it and get me access to the filesystem for a short time before the clunk (which killed my access) and I managed to get all the folder and file names but no actual data.
Now when powered the drive spins up but doesn't show in Windows. If left for about 30secs data recover programs like GetDataBack detect it but can do nothing with it and just report read errors. The clunk no longer occurs so now I'm stumped.

I want to get an idea of what is going on inside the drive and have recorded the noise it makes. Would anyone maybe be able to tell me what the situation with it is most likely to be please?

Here is a .m4a recording I made on my phone of what the drive sounds like when held up to my ear. Hopefully you will be able to grab the file.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nlkch58x9yqbx6k/Dodgy%20Drive%20Noise.m4a?dl=0

Hope someone can shed some light, mny thanks in advance!

Hi, it sounds like the Read/Write heads are on the platter now...don't Power that drive on again.
Contact member Pcimage here on the forum, he can help you...he's located in Peterborough.
Is the drive a 2.5" Hitachi?

Bosse

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Rescue IT Datarecovery service Sweden
Rescue IT Dataräddning Göteborg AB
http://www.rescue-it.se

+1 for pcimage

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Data Recovery Pakistan

Will do. Many thanks.

Western Digital 500GB by the way.