Externall HDD problems

Last night my external HDD (Which has all my music, all my applications, videos, everything on it) was working fine. When I wake up this morning, I go to put on some music, and my program freezes. I waited for a minute because I thought it might be my computer. Then I heard a noise coming from it, not the normal noise of it doing something, this noise was... rhythmic, or like it was trying to do the same thing over and over again. So I turned it off, and lo and behold, my computer un-freezes and aall is dandy.

So why did my external hdd all of the sudden take a shit? It was working fine, and then boom, it's dead. I thought it may be hot, so I turned it off this morning, went to work, came back tonight, turned it on, and this time it came up saying "You need to reformat the disc in drive H before you can use it.". I really, REALLY don't want to format my drive, it has all my shit on it, are there any other options?

I'm running on vista ultimate, hdd is connected via usb 2.0.

in b4 me using vista is the problem.

Your hard drive is dying, if not dead already.

Normally at the first sign of it (clicking, noises) you should have backed up all your data as soon as possible and replaced the hard drive. You don't continue using a drive that shows signs of failure.

Maybe you're lucky and can still get some of your data back. Probably not. Deal with it and learn from it.