Hard drive took a dive. Please help!

[wayshway]

My hard drive started to make a clicking noise then died this morning. I bought a new one and installed it.
Is there a way I can retrieve all my work from the one that died?

Thanks a bunch.

[lordsmurf]

There are a lot of different supposed methods, best found via internet searches. I've never had luck freezing a drive, a common suggestion. I find the drive is usually toast, and you can pay a recovery service about $500.

This is a reason I have 1TB external drives for backups.

[wayshway]

I actually did the freezer thing and it worked brilliantly.

[padre2]

Yup, the freezer thing work for me a bunch of times. You can prolong the time you get out of the drive by getting a can of cooler (don't know what it's called nowdays, but it used to be a spray can of freon - but freon is bad for the ozone, so there is something different). After you take the drive out of the freezer and start it, get your backup/transfer going. Then you can hit it with the cooler ever so often to keep the temperature down. It just gives you a little longer to backup the drive.

[JonathanEntertainment]

"Writes down for furture refrence"

[Tranzor]

and if the freezer method does not work, I used some amazing software called
"acronis true home image". The drive would not work at all with anything tried (including other HD software made for this sort of thing). It took over 15 hours but this software was able to retrieve virtually everything from my crashed drive (talking 8 gigs worth)

[MagnificentMarcus]

What would you guys do with a external harddrive that you can't access? I had all my Matlocks eps all sorted and now I can't access the drive.

[cp32]

Use Stellar...Works on any drive. You can recover up 2gigs in demo mode