Insert System Disk - Help!!!

Clicking and a non recognized hard drive, doesn't sound very good.
If you can't get the hard drive recognized in an external USB case the you should look at a recovery company to do it for you. This company offers a guarantee to recover the data or you don't pay.
http://www.gillware.com/
You have to weigh the cost of recovery against how much you value your data as this method of recovery can be expensive.

Yes, if the drive is clicking, it won't be accessible without repair.  Essentially, these expensive services repair the drive in a clean room and make it work again so they can pull off the data.  The chances are good that they can recover most if not all of your data.  I have used several companies, and only 3 of the 20 or so drives I sent in have been unrecoverable.  Gliiware is very good, and so is OnTrack, but I think Gillware is much cheaper.

Before sending it off to a recovery service, do as f-king said and try it on another computer in an external USB enclosure.  (Better yet, find someone who knows computers and has an external USB enclosure), but before you do, put in in a cool dry place (dry is important, not the 'fridge).  Quite often I have seen dead drives work for 5-10 minutes if allowed to cool first, perhaps enough time to rescue your work.

Other than recovering your work, replacing a notebook drive is quite simple.  Any local computer store can do it.  Depending on the drive, it might cost $100-$200 US.  Any local geek can also do it for the cost of the drive and the price of a pint.

Once that is done, go buy your own external USB disk and use it to back up your next computer.

first is to recover the data; to do this, i recommend hooking the disk to an ide cable of a working pc - you may need an 2.5" to 3.5" cable adaptor to do this - Why ? because hooking it to an usb cable adds another interface layer.
if you are lucky, you can just read the data.
if not, i suggest these guys :  http://www.gillware.com/   Cheap and Good !

@All other experts
>>> External Enclosure/USB cable/IDE Cable.

Are you certain these methods will work?
Personally i tend to associate a ticking hard drive with a mechanical problem related to the disks or the disk head.
In that case the hard disk should be left along as much as possible, to prevent any damage that could be caused by defect parts such as scratches. Also, an enclosure or cable would not work if the disks or the heads are the problem, since the harddisk simply cant get any data from the platters, no matter what output mechanism is used.

However, seeing that a lot of you responded with these solutions, im wondering if my own interpretation on these ticking matters are correct. Can the methods named above really get data of a broken harddisk? I cant really understand "How" in this case, unless i'm simply miss-associating the ticking with defective heads/platters. Could any of you give me a little heads up on this? :)

~Irial

it can be the ticking is not always - when it has periods that it runsok, the drive"might " be accessed.
but i agree with you that a ticking drive is difficult to access; sometimes people claim to do it after having the drive in a ziplock bag in the freezer for some hours, then it seems it works for maybe 5 minutes to upto 1/2 Hr

"Can the methods named above really get data of a broken harddisk?"

Depends on how bad the HW failure is. The way I see it though, any attempts at recovery could worsen the chance of professional data recovery. My philosophy, is that it depeds on teh importance of the data. If it is mission critical, then I would *maybe* try and slave it, to run Data Recovery apps, but at th first sign of a plattercrashing, or other bad noises, I kill the Pc. I might even go as far as to replace the controller card from an identical known working drive. ...

If the data isnt too critical, I might try the freezer method, and if there is no data, I will tinker with it until I am blue in the face.

But none of the methods above will work if the drive is past it's life. Ticking is is not always an immediate failure, but sometimes it is. But I would suggest that you adjust how much effort goes into the physical part of the troubleshooting, based on your client's data needs.

Data is king in this world.....

Someone's definition of "ticking" might also be different than yours.  It might not be heads hitting the disk, infact I don't believe I have ever seen a true head crash.  Most drives today auto-park and unless you drop it while in motion, it is unlikely to be physical damage.  The "ticking" I encounter most frequently is excessive head seeks and head recalibration (or whatever it does to after a series of seek failures) where the head is not hitting the disk, but moving all the way back to park and trying again due to read errors.

Letting the disk cool definitely can help in these situations, I have been there several times and it works.  (I am too squeamish to do the freezer bit though)

The way I see it, if they didn't back it up, they don't really need it back anyway.  ;-)