I have a Western Digital USB external hard drive. I had it for about a year and all of a sudden the thing starts making a ticking noise when you turn it on, but when you plug it into the usb port, vista makes the sound that it detects the drive, but it does not show up and I cannot access it. I have tried all different types of data recovery software, but they also do not detect my drive. So i’m thinking about sending it to one of the data recovery labs. How exactly does this process work? and about how much would it cost me (it is a 500 gb hard drive with about 200 gb used up)? and about how long would it take for me to get my drive/files back from them?
thanks for all the answers everybody. i know that taking it to a data specialist will be pretty expensive, but around what range are we talking? and where are some of the places that I could take it to?

I need to know if this is an easy problem to fix or if there is a cheap way under 0(AU) to get the data back. It is an 80GB hard drive with less than 25GB of data. Would software recovery work? Or is it a mechanical problem?
It is a SATA hard drive out of a laptop. I have attempted to plug it in using an external hard drive casing but nothing was detected… please please help!!

My external hard drive died out of nowhere. I plugged it as usual and it didn’t detect. So I disassembled the external and installed that hard drive into the desktop. When I boot up into windows it detects the hard drive but it shows as an unallocated drive.

Is there any software (free or for purchase) that will allow me to see my data?

Just recently I attempted to backup some of my files to an external hard drive using Windows Vista’s Backup and Restore center. I noticed that during the backup, about 1 GB of data showed up on my primary hard drive. What are these files, and how do I remove them?