Question: When I booted my computer today, it wouldn’t progress past BIOS. One of the drives ( the one holding the OS, of course ) spins up, goes “click click”, and then spins down and repeats the process.
How recoverable would you say this drive is (or not)?
The drive is a Western Digital WD3200JD 320GB
Answer: That seems to be not an uncommon problem with WD drives. About half of my drives I had from WD exhibited that problem sooner or later. As long as you get it running again (might take hours) you probably can get your data off of it again, depending how long it survives before going into that click-click routine again.
But for all practical purposes the drive is dead. The only thing you could hope for would be that you still have warranty on it.