Harddrive failure

Depends. What happened to the drive? Was it phsically damaged? Is it clicking? Is it grinding?

Also.
Do you feel it spinning up?
If it is not spinning, then it is dead.

Give us a little more information on the issue with the drive, especially with what was stated by: "jgerbasi" above.

Carrzkiss

You can't possibly do decent recovery using a USB bridge device, because it masks any hardware  problems and they simply aren't designed to work properly with a drive in stress.

Based on what little data you supplied, then most likely the drive failed and a recovery lab is only course of action (plus $500+).

Also your first course of action on any recovery is to run a health assessment that does not do any I/O to the platter, as quickly as possible. This is impossible to do when a disk is behind a bridge, because that does a protocol conversion from SATA to SCSI, and the low-level commands don't translate.

Since you don't see a target device, then you have no idea what is going on.You aren't even talking to the disk drive anyway, you're talking to a bridge chip in windows, and no telling how it would handle an unhealthy drive. They aren't designed to work on sick disks.

if the drive is clicking, put it in a zip lock bag and stick it in your freezer for a good while.  I have used this trick successfully numerous times to recover data from clicking drives.

Putting a drive in the freezer should be last resort. If data is critical bring it to a lab. It may be costly but if you freeze it the lab may not even be able to help. Although the freezer trick has also worked for me in the past. But it is hit or miss and depends on how much data you need to get as you may only get a few minutes.

Sorry for few details, lets see if this helps...

From what I can tell the disk was NOT physically damaged.  

When I have it connected to the usb connector (one with power) it does start up.
 
Upon an initial startup if I hold my ear up to the drive I hear some "soft" clicking.  It does this for about 45 seconds and stops.

I do NOT hear any grinding

I did put the drive in the laptop and the system does NOT recognize the drive.

Let me know if you need any further information.

Statistically the freezer trick is right up there with winning a lottery and is more urban legend then fact.  When you had old shugart mechanisms and 5GB disk drives then such things worked much more often.

Now you just risk doing a heck of a lot more damage.  Even IF the cold temperature had the desired effect, it will only last 1-2 minutes because the disk will heat up, so even if it worked, the technique is typically only good for just a few files.

Don't go down that path unless you are prepared to turn something that is probably 100% recoverable for $500 into a paperweight that is unrecoverable.

If the data was critical enough where you don't want to "Risk" the freezer trick, then the data should have been backed up in the first place.

Thanks for the comments, I have not put it in the freezer and won't at this time.

Yes, I understand backups, unfortunately this is a new customer and this is my first help ticket with them.  

Please advise to any next steps,

Thanks

Any other suggestions on getting the data?

Have you tried hooking the drive directly up to a SATA and power port on a desktop computer?  I've run into certain times where a USB->Sata/IDE bridge won't successfully see the drive.

Past that, it's gotta go to a data recovery specialist.

You can Ubuntu Live to check if it can see the HDD.

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/use-ubuntu-live-cd-to-backup-files-from-your-dead-windows-computer/

Sudeep

I agree with the comments from above.

I had the hard drive sent out and the heads are bad.  Customer is paying alot because they want to have the data within 24 hours.

This was my first introduction to this customer and I am fanatical about backups.  I wish they would have known me about 2 months earlier..... oh well.

Thanks for trying to help and comments, I always learn something new.