I used to get the click/whirr/grind thing on an external drive. Turns out it was the logic board in the enclosure that was bad, and the drive worked just fine when I removed the external enclosure. But, it sounds like you're talking about an internal drive, so my experience won't really help. My sister shares your pain. There's some utility you can download that is free to use to see what's recoverable, but you have to pay per GB for the actual recovery. Not sure how it worked, but I know they charged her a lot more than they said and didn't recover everything they promised.
Greg /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
