Western Digital hard drive not working

I have a Western Digital Elements 1Tb external drive which contains around 490Gb of data.(The drive itself is a WD Caviar Green, 32Mb cache)
The drive functioned normally for an amount of time but a while ago it started failing to spin up. I'm not getting the distinct 'click' of a dead drive, just repeated quiet attempts to get itself going.
I have removed the drive from its enclosure to see if the casing was the problem. After connecting it to an internal SATA port and power cable my PC failed to boot so it seems it is the drive itself which is the problem.
The drive shows up in Device Manager as working properly and any diagnostic tools show the correct capacity and volume of data but the folders remain inaccessible and my PC seems to struggle to perform some tasks while the drive is attempting to start. When the drive does finally show up it shows as a 'local drive' in 'My Computer' and remains inaccessible.
I have tried:
Editing the registry as advised on the Microsoft support site
Changing the drive letter
Multiple USB and power cables
Using as an internal drive
 
Well, if you can't access any files even when the drive is set as an external, the drive is toast... unless you want to pay someone to retrieve any data
 
I,m not an expert on this or anything,but I had a similiar problem on an ide drive a few years ago.
I ran belarc advisor,and the status said fail or about to fail.
There also may be help using 2 software programs such as Get Data Back,and ERD.
 
(Apologies if you already tried this:) ) It might be worth trying to boot from a Linux live disk, it might pick it up where the onboard OS failed?
 
George_Quin,

We are sorry to hear about your external drive concerns. Have you tried connecting the drive to another computer internally or externally? If the operating system and diagnostic software can view the drive but it remains inaccessible, there could be a corruption of the Partition Table or File Allocation Table. In either event, you would want to refrain from attempting any write operations before you can recover any data, as the write operations would be data destructive to the information on the drive. You can also attempt to use a third party recovery software, or a data recovery company as well. We have a list of Data Recovery Companies that we can recommend that may be able to give you discounts for being a Western Digital customer, free trial data recovery software to see what you can recover as well as free quotes on pricing and whether data can be recovered. If a Data Recovery Company is the direction you would like to go, please view the information provided by the following link.
http://support.wdc.com/recovery/index.asp?wdc_lang=en
We hope some of this information can be useful to you.
 
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