I have a 250 Gb Seagate external harddrive.

I've transferred all my comedy cassettes to Mp3 and put them all onto the drive.

When I turned the drive on today it gave out all sorts of clicking noises and the drive light goes on and off.It sounds very unhealthy.

Most of the time the drive doesn't show at all in 'my computer' but occasionally the noises stop and the drive settles down and it appears with a different drive letter to what it was before.When I click on the drive a get a message 'drive I is not formatted - do you want to format ?Y/N?'

Now I accept the drive is broken and fairly cheap these days to replace but have I lost all my valuable recordings? I know everyone says you should always back stuff up but it's always something you're going to do tomorrow !!!

Is there any way I can retreive my stuff to put onto a new drive (and back up) ??

Thanks

You can try loading a Linux Live Cd Like Ubuntu or One of the other Distros and after it loads see if your Hardrive shows up in Linux . Then see if you can retrieve your data and burn it from there. If that won't work it gets pretty expensive to retrieve data after that. Googling retrieve data off hardrive should give you an idea of the costs. Running a live Cd from Linux won't interfere or be installed on your existing system. Thats why its called a live CD.

Somebody told me that as all was probably lost to put it in the freezer for an hour.

I did this and all my files returned for a couple of minutes but not long enough for me to transfer anything.

I've probably killed it completely but the freezer thing worked for a short while

When you go into bios and see if the external hardrive is registering with all its gigs intact or is it showing zero. If it shows zero in bios its probably toast.

The really frustrating thing is that by freezing the drive I can see all my lost files in My Computer,I just don't get any time to transfer them as the drive packs up again quickly

I was in your situation with my Panasonic Toughbook awhile back and I ended up having to declare my hardrive was toasted. I lost all files, my embedded Windows XP O/S, and some Drivers for the lappy after changing out the Hardrive. So I know how you feel. I checked into recovering my data with a professional service. The bucks involved didn't justify recovery. Don't know which route your'e gonna take but I ended up changing out the hardrive and running Linux on it and I;m Happy with the results. Good luck with whatever you decide on doing but it sure looks like your options are gonna be limited.