My Western Digital 500GB EDD has been making Clicking noise

Clicking is not good. Sounds like the drive is dying/dead. Power it off for a while. Put it in the freezer and plug it back in. If it works, copy the stuff off ASAP before it dies again.

WD External drives are just thier regular internal drives in an external drive chassis with circuit board. Mine failed also (no clicking), but my PC stopped seeing it,,and finally any PC I used with it stopped recognizing it. WD tech support told me that I was out of warranty, BUT this is a very common issue with WD external drives bought in 2005 thru 2008 (time frame,,roughly). WD tech support told me to open the chassis, tear out everything, and remove the harddrive. Then install the harddrive into my desktop PC as any regular harddisk. So I did that , and it works great !! as a 'third hard disk' in my PC. Everything I had stored on it was still there!! No special software or recovery stuff was used, just plugged it into the approriate internal PC harddisk data cable and its approriate internal PC harddisk power cable (look up installing harddisks on internet for more help). Good fixin !!

Here are some options to try: - Purchase an alternate enclosure for your hard disk enclosure in case the circuit board in the WD case has gone bad. - Try accessing the drive via MS DOS window and use CHKDSK command to repair the drive (if you can get it to be recognized). - Try connecting the drive to an alternate PC or even a Mac to see if the drive can be recognized (perform disk repair if recognized).