You have been unable to get your drive to function, and you are hearing clacking, clicking, grinding, or any other strange noises coming from it. Need to recover the data? Freezing is worth a shot-- it won't damage anything, it's non-invasive, and it's kind of fun.
The idea behind freezing your drive comes from the cold temperature shrinking the materials in the drive, potentially reducing problematic friction temporarily. The problem with this is that it doesn't always work, and is almost always a very temporary fix, as the drive will heat up during operation.
There are just a few simple steps to this process:
Insert the drive into a clean Ziploc bag to prevent condensation. There will be moisture when you remove it from the bag later, but better later than the whole time.
Place the bagged drive into your freezer for at least a few hours, preferably overnight. You want the drive to uniformly reach the lowest temperature you can reach, and that will take longer than an hour.
Connect the drive to an already running PC, via USB. This will extend your recovery time by skipping the boot up process, but will require either an external USB drive enclosure or a USB-to-IDE cable. You definitely want USB 2.0 for this process.
Copy until you can't copy anymore. Repeat if you can. As in any recovery, you should have planned ahead and should have a prioritized list of the data you want to recover.
Bonus points. Keep the drive cool during recovery to make it last longer. You can't really use liquid, but having a fan or blowing A/C on the drive may help.
Good luck, and let us know if this works for you.