[PodcastMN] Can you help me rescue my files?

[Zee and Zed]

Hello all, I apologize for the mass e-mail but right now I'm at the "I'll do
anything" point.  Put short, I have a 250gb Western Digital external hard
drive (Firewire/USB - it's always been connected via Firewire), it's been in
use for just over a year now, about 200gb full.  It's broken and I need help
recovering our files.  I'm mass emailing everyone because they are family
photos, audio recordings, writings, websites I've developed, pictures sent
by friends, resumes, etc.  Most of the pictures I have on CD but everything
else is pretty much in limbo.  I don't care much if I can't get the music
but I want to get everything else off the drive.  There was a lot of stuff
that can never be re-created.

Today I copied the contents of our iTunes library (about 160gb) from the
internal drive on our machine (Windows XP, Pentium 4, 3.2ghz) to the
external drive.  A bit later I rebooted and then all hell broke loose. Okay,
it wasn't all hell breaking loose you can imagine what happened next.  I got
mad.

Right now when you boot up it makes a clicking sound.  The drive isn't
assigned a letter however I know the machine recognizes it; the "Safely
Remove Hardware" icon in the system tray has listed it and you can remove it
that way and power it off (it's powered off and on when the machine
starts).  The files are nowhere to be seen, however.

Does anyone know of a program to recover data?  Or a trick to making the
damn drive work at least temporarily?  I'm assuming I'll have to toss the
drive away, that's fine, I just want what's on it.  I have an older
bubble-style Firewire equipped iMac G3 running the latest version of OS X (I
think it's 10.4.10).  I was going to plug it into there but haven't done so
yet on the odd chance it makes things worse.  I'm exercising caution...

Again, I apologize for the group e-mail, hopefully you don't find it
intrusive.  If you don't have any idea, don't worry about it.  I thought I'd
take a chance and email everyone I know who might have an idea how to
recover our files rather than spending countless hours going out of my mind
trying to find something that works or bringing it in and paying $200
(less/more?) for lackluster results I could have accomplished myself.  You'd
think I would know, this has happened to me once before (a Maxtor external
Firewire HD which prompted the purchase of this drive) however in that case
I was able to rescue everything before it ultimately died.  I have a feeling
it might be too late now...

Thanks for any help you can offer.

-Ross
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