The clicking is a bad sign, obviously. I suspect the hard drive has overheated, perhaps repeatedly. (All the more likely with a laptop). The clicking indicates it is likely jammed.
You're no doubt kicking yourself for not making restore discs or a backup of the laptop.
Maybe someone else has a more practicable solution for you, but since you asked... First a little background: You may have read that chilling the hard drive may UN-jam it. This actually works, sometimes. Repeat SOMETIMES. I just did it recently for a friend's desktop.
I took out the hard drive, put it in a ziplock bag, and into the fridge for an hour. In the meantime I put the new drive in (jumpers on both drives set to CS). Then hooked up the old drive, left the comp case open and set a big fan to blow on the hard drive. It's either that or leave it in the bag, as a cold surface will draw condensation. It booted right up.
At that point, you either make a bootable clone (which is what I did), or use something like Acronis or Ghost to image the drive. You just have to hope the process completes before the hard drive goes belly-up again. BTW, all hard drive manufacturers offer free utilities that allow you to make a bootable clone. WD: DataLifeguard, Seagate: Seatools, etc. They're all remarkably similar and even though they will complain if you use, say, a Seagate drive with DataLifeguard, they will do the job nevertheless.
Dunno what else to tell you. Good luck.
Linear Mode
