How to Recover files from a damaged hard drive

Q. Earlier this week my laptop failed to boot up. On removing the hard drive and putting it in a USB carrier I listened to hear it spinning up. I am somewhat familiar to the various sounds they make as they spin up, as well as all didn't sound somewhat right. My computer recognised that an external USB device had been connected, as well as searching in Device Manager, the hard drive was reported as working normally. Yet it does not get allocated a drive letter and so effectively it is unreadable. It also does not appear under Drive Management. Do you think the drive has totally failed? Is there anything else I can do to recover some of the data off it?
A. Hard drives can fail without warning, although you’ll normally receive some advanced notice, usually in the form or strange noises, or problems when reading or writing files. It sounds as if your drive is spinning, hence your computer is recognising it, but the read/write arm is not moving, because you’d hear that as a faint clicking noise. This corresponds with the drive not showing up in Drive Management. If this is the case, then the news isn’t good. Data recovery software will only work if the data can be accessed, which clearly isn’t happening here. Although data recovery services, like Kroll Ontrack (www.ontrackdatarecovery.co.uk) can take the platters from your drive, as well as put them into another drive, the cost is very high and likely not worth it for your needs. You can attempt downloading a program from the website though, called Verifile, which will tell you if your files are actually recoverable.