I would first use the manufacturer's diagnostic utility to check the drive. For you, it's Western Digital Data Lifeguard diagnostics. You can download the Ultimate Boot CD which has the utility, burn it on another computer and boot with it on the computer that is having the problem. Run a short test and see what it says.
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Then, you have four options in my mind.
1. Connect the drive as a secondary drive in another Windows system (either internally or externally via USB-to-SATA adapter) and try to read data off of it.
2. Sometimes if you boot to Linux, like Ubuntu on a memory stick, it is more able to read a bad hard drive and NOT lock the system up. Windows tends to choke when trying to read a drive that is not responding.
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3. Try some recovery software to see if it can read the data and pull some off. I also like GetDataBack Simple. Not free but free to see if it can see the files and then it will most likely recover if you buy the product.
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4. If the drive is really toasty and cannot be read, send the drive out for recovery. Lots of places, but our company used this place.
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You're looking at $300 or more to get the data back.
And as a final note, backup would have saved a lot of pain and possibly money here. I used Macrium to image my entire hard drive monthly and backup my data folders. Plus I use iDrive to backup my data daily to their cloud.
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Modern man's daydreams have turned into nightmares.