External USB drive unit clicks, not recognized in XP

This is more of a preventive measure, but when storing such critical data, you should make sure your external hard drive has proper cooling, otherwise that could lead to dramatically reduced drive life. We did an episode of our video blog a few month back on exactly this topic of how poorly most external USB drives are cooled. The video also shows a simply fix for a few bucks that pretty much solves any heating issues you may have. You can see it here: http://www.vlogolution.com/vlog/moMONEY/20070309.html

Hi, in a similar nightmare I was able recover my files from an "unpartitioned harddrive" and copy them to my C drive. I connected the bad hard drive directly to the 2nd IDE of my computer after removing it from its external casing/usb interface. Since it was the only device connected to the 2nd IDE, it was immaterial whether it was set to master or slave. I then booted normally. Using a program called GetDataBack, I was able to recover all my MP3s, years of Thesis work, tons of pictures and home movie clips, back-up installers and others. GetDataBack > http://www.runtime.org/downloads.htm. Issues encountered during the recovery: 1) it recovers everything including deleted files (so sometimes lots of duplicated file names, be careful); 2) the trial version will not allow you to copy the entire drive; 3) the free space of my C was not enough, I was then forced to shutdown buy a bigger harddrive, set the bad and the new as master and slave in IDE 2 and start all over again; 4) patience, recovery of an 80Gb Barracuda took almost overnight; and after everything was recovered 5) the bad 80Gb was repartitioned and formatted and worked again (now my E:). Hope this work out for you. Pls let us know how things turn up. Kind regards.