External hard drive not working properly

I can only assume that from the grinding sound that your Hard drive is about to completely die. One option would be to open the case and install it into your computer as an internal drive, however that may or may not work as different types of interfaces are not supported on all motherboards. If you are not familiar with PC repair, I would advise you to avoid this route and seek help from a person who does. Some companies can recover data from dead drives, drawback is that they can charge upwards of $1000 per GB of data recovered. Either way that drive needs to be replaced.