Technology Forum

Hello TSF!After doing some searching looks like WD MyBook's are prone to issues. Ive had my 500gb Premium Edition for about 18 months, using it as backup/storage for my work (photographer), connected to my XP SP2 PC via firewire and sitting in a well ventilated low dust area. Worked fine Saturday, Sunday morning when I turned the PC on I heard a ticking noise coming from the MyBook. I then proceed to unplug the firewire, as that makes the HD shut itself down, then removed the power. Plugged everything back in and it made the same click........ click........ click....... sound for a moment then shut itself off. I did the process again with the same results and haven't done so since. The computer would make the the audible notifications when I was unpluging and pluging, but the drive did not show up in My Computer.I called WD and received no help, called a couple data recovery places and got some mixed information with really high $$$$ quotes, and finally talked to ESS Data Recovery and they provided some answers and seemed very knowledgeable about my issue and quoted me $500-900 for recovery. The data on the drive is all of my photography work over the past 2 1/2 years cause I took it all off my PC HD a month ago cause my PC was acting up. According to ESS, the reading arm is just swinging back and forth not recognizing any data to stop on causing it to hit the spinning center which is whats making the clicking.Is there a way to reset the arm so it will start reading data?Are there any other routes I should look into before I shell out the $ to ESS to recover the data?Thanks!