dead hard drive

well, one of my external hd's (in a removable enclosure) has bit the dust.  whenever i connect it to power, i just hear this awful scraping sound.

some questions:

1) any chance i could get any data off of it or should i give up

2) i think the fat table (it was fat32 formatted) is fucked - i can use linux dd to directly copy the sectors, right? if not, what should i use?

3) it's been defragged regularly, that puts all the data at the start of the volume, right?

4) once i try this, assuming i can, what should i do with the drive?

Can you still access the harddrive?

if you can, there is a free program on snapfiles.com
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/pcinspector.html

If you power up the hdd and then turn it around and that makes the sound differ, then it's probably done for, or it's going to be real soon.

"Awful scraping sound" implies major physical damage to the disk. It's extremely unlikely you'll get anything back from it without a professional data recovery agency.

Be prepared to spend $400..$1500 on recovery

>>2
i think the operating system can still access it, it's just when data is read off of it it returns errors.

thank you for the link.

>>3
well, i might try the freezer trick one more time... maybe i could put the computer on top of the refrigerator and actually run the hd in the freezer ...

>>4
time to ultra-leech lol

Tried Knoppix?

I don't know any advanced methods, but when my drive went down the drain with physical damage I just loaded up Knoppix and copied my files over.

hey...what's this!!!
dd_rescue is what i need!

>>2 thx for the wonderful undelete program btw