Well, that's a kick in the pants ...

[daveyfiacre]

i hope you can get it fixed!

also...

"Little David" is the nickname my entire family calls me, and has been for the last 25 years @_@. we're twinsies!

[The Fifth Horseman]

Forgot to say earlier...
With DMDE, it's recommended to not go into recovering individual files immediately if the drive is clearly on its' way out. Grab an empty HDD of at least the same size and copy the sectors from the drive you're trying to recover. Then work on that copy - anything goes wrong, the original is still there.

Back in 2010, I had a HDD fail on me - not complete failure, thankfully, but the drive still went "clunk" and the machine crashed. The drive technically worked, but was taking several minutes to start up and be detected, always with a rather ominous clattering sound whenever it encountered a faulty sector. Dumped an image (due to the amount of damaged sectors I had to do it in parts over several weeks), wrote it to a spare HDD, most of the data recovered just fine.

[Profit]

I have to disagree with Guyperfect.

What he says here is absolutely correct,

The moving parts inside are calibrated with a precision smaller than a particle of smoke, and shock is a sure-fire way to ruin it for good. Drive failures are usually caused by the mechanics wearing out in the first place, resulting in the magnetic heads coming into contact with the platters, and bouncing it around will only expediate the damage. The nature of electric motors may result in some short-term improvement of functionality after concussive force, but this is akin to loosening the lid of a glass jar by hurtling it down a flight of concrete steps.

I have to disagree with the not dropping part, only  because I have seen it work a few times. Again, I am not recommending to go out and do it immediately, just add it to your list of options. In terms of priority for me, I choose in this manner,
1. Send off to professional data retrieval.
2. Run data recovery program
3. Freeze
4. Drop

It is an option. Just not your first option. And the way it was explained to me was the shock from dropping will either reset the bearings or completely trash the drive. I also do trust the guy who told me that very much which doesn't amount to a hill of beans on an internet forum.

[MultipleGirl]

As far as the not showing up through USB issue, I have that happen a lot in the shop (Do computer repair for a living, and data recovery quite often). If the drive will not show up in data recovery apps via USB, we simply turn the machine off and connect it directly to the Sata port (IDE if you really still use those...) and try a second time. Most of the time they will show up at that point just fine. Windows may still see the drive as corrupt/unformatted/unkown but the apps will have access and start pulling data off.

Dropping/Freezing etc.. A lot of people swear by them, a lot of people don't. Personally I think if the methods have "worked", it's pure coincidence and nothing more, barring solidified oil/dust

[Leandro]

I had several WDs die in quick succession somewhere around 2002-2004ish, swore them off, and have gone all Seagate since then without issue.

I've had two WDs die on me in November (which is why I was offline for the end-of-game event...) but I still prefer WD over other brands because they have FANTASTIC support. It's the only company that has a replacements center here in Argentina, and all I had to do was show up with the defective drive and an RMA printed from their website, and I left with a new harddisk in minutes. Then when *that* drive turned out to be defective as well, I was given a bigger drive in apology for the inconvenience.

Even if the failure rate is higher (and my sample size is too small to be significant) their excellent support makes up for it. Of course, I can say that because I keep multiple backups of everything. If I had actually lost data I would be in a worse mood about it.

Regarding the OP's problem: long ago, when all other options had been exhausted (just replacing the controller board didn't work), I did a platter transplant. Cleaned the heck out of a small room to try to get dust out of the way, worked inside some garbage bags while wearing a face mask, opened the dead drive and a very similar drive that was fully functional, and carefully put the platters from one disc in the other, being careful to veeery gently manipulate the read mechanism and platters. It worked; the disk was recognized with all the files inside perfectly intact. Which I immediately copied to another drive while feeling the king of the universe.

But if you can hear the platters spinning, just swapping the controller board is likely to do the trick.