[xjsb125]

In most cases with hard drives, your best bet is to try and pull whatever you can off of them, and not hook it up after that. If it's clicking, or overheating, then there is a serious issue with it. Continued usage will damage the platters to the point they are unreadable. If you try and open the drive in an environment that isn't 100% static and dust free, you can corrupt the data to the point it might be unrecoverable. If you're seeing the delayed write failure message, odds are the read/write heads are failing. I'd do a Google search for a local hard drive recovery place in your area and let them attempt to recover what you have on it. Sending it off to a lab, such as DataTech in Denver, can get very expensive based on the type of drive failure. Any time you have some critical data you don't want to lose, it's best to have at least 2 back ups. Fortunately you can pick up portable drives for a lot cheaper than you could 2-3 years ago.