How do you get info of a damaged hard drive with out spending a bundle of $?

Question

It made a clicking sound and then stopped working.

Answer 1

Your problem sounds bad enough that this may not work, but a simple thing to try is to plug the hard drive as a slave in another PC. If the other PC reads the data, hurry up and copy it to the working master drive. If you cannot read the drive, try running diagnostic tools (e.g., Norton Systemworks) from that other PC. Your drive sounds dead, though. In that case, Sky above has probably what is the best solution - good luck in finding an exact match, though.

Answer 2

There is a small chance that the drive does not work due to a failure in the electronics. In that case I had success in the past by transplanting the circut board from an exact same working model. You can usually tell if the electronics are fried by checking if your computer detects the drive in the bios. Otherwise data recovery services and a big wallet.