The Sounds of Failing Hard Drives
zzptichka sends along a link to recordings of typical sounds from 35 different failing and dying hard drives. The host of these sounds, Datacent, is in the business of data recovery, so presumably they have heard it all.
I've heard it one too many times, which is >= 1 times. I pretty much give up at that point - once the click starts, your drive quickly begins to stop :(
Just in case you don't want or don't need to order data recovery from a professional service, which is often expensive and takes time, here are some do-it-yourself guides for data recovery from broken hard disk drives. Of course you will not try these approaches if your data are really precious. But it you can afford to loose the data or you don't want to reveal them to others, these guides are worth a try to get the data resurrected.
Get yourself a nice little present and install "FlashGot". It is a FireFox plugin and it will download whatever you like, including Flash and embedded media.
Uhh.. actually you should have booted up off the CD, selected "recovery console" and then run chkdsk /f c:
How we know is more important than what we know.