Last time I had a drive with the click-of-death, I froze it in the freezer and was able to recover everything. I tried the freezing trick again with this drive.
(For clarity, the hard-drive was outside of the house, between the window and the screen. I left it out for a week or so.)
NB: While freezing a click-of-death drive can indeed help get it to work long enough to copy the files, this is not how you’re supposed to do it; it will get moisture in it which will freeze into sharp ice-crystals and drastically reduce your chances of recovering your files. Put it in a sealed bag (preferably vacuum the air out of it) and put it in the freezer. This drive and whatever was on it wasn’t important, so I was just messing around.
I don’t remember what (if anything) was on this drive. If I could see the label to know what drive it was, that would help, but alack, I can’t see it. It was probably either empty, or had some files which I did manage to get off of it
Another drive was doing the click-of-death this year, and I put it in the freezer. Unfortunately, freezing it didn’t work and it kept clicking. I ended up putting it in the freezer for 3-4 months (I pretty much gave up on it and didn’t bother taking it out of the freezer). I eventually did take it out and tried it, but it still clicked. I said the heck with it and left it in the HDD-dock and let it just keep on clicking and spinning up and down over and over again. Eventually, it stopped clicking and became readable. I actually managed to copy everything from it. 😲