Sorry to hear about your loss the clicking sound is the heads trying to get a fix sometimes this is caused by the actual harddisk firmware and not a fault, sometimes its caused by a shock, or electrical surge or just disk fail, However there is ways to get the data back, I used http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/index.aspx on a few occasions, I know that they only charge you to recover data if they actually can get it off they dont charge if they can't so might be worth a try, The most it will cost is getting it to them, but if you do ship put plenty of padding or ask your computer shop for hard disk boxes that they might have got when they bought disks,

Anyway I know how it feels to loose data, Happened once to me never again.

Ken