Hard drive data restoration?

So my hard drive died. It's making beeping noises. From what I heard a thingamajigger got loose and can't connect to the kerfluffle.

God, I'm so bad at this.

What I wanna ask is this, I guess. I don't intend to try to fix it myself, I'm just scared I'll be losing everything and it's the middle of the night. What would have to happen to a hard drive to make it impossible to restore the data? I'm gonna take it to the computer doctor in the morning and listen what he says. I'm just hoping someone here can reassure me so I can focus on my presentation :(

I don't know of any way to save data from a HDD that is dead/dying/broken :(

If it's beeping the disk head is probably damaged, so technically a true professional very-expensive shop could possibly restore it; but in practical terms if your hard drive starts beeping you will probably never see anything from it again. That is why backups are important if you don't want to lose things.

Then again the beeping could actually be from something else like your motherboard complaining about a RAM failure and then nothing will be lost.

Expensive is probably the answer. But you may luck out and find a local computer shop that likes to dabble into data forensics. Or you can look up places. We have them here in the states, and they pretty much guarantee data recovery but charge per gig, which can add up fast for large capacity drives

If you have a Tekserve nearby I'd take it there and see if they can do a retrieval. They may be able to save the data, but not the drive.

I actually discovered a program called Data Rescue. It recently worked at getting data off of a corrupt camera card so you might be able to try that for a hard drive.

If there's a mechanical error, it's pretty hard for any software to do anything about it. Unless you plan on taking it to some pro data restoring thing (these often cost a *lot* when there is mechanical errors involved), it probably won't hurt to try, though.