Yup, I woke up to a dead hard drive, my external USB drive has failed, I blame myself really, the drive is at least 5 years old and I always tell people, customers, when they reach 5 years replace them before they die, I didn't and have lost all my music, videos and pictures.

Not too happy about that.

Oh man that is bad news.  You have my sympathy although that's not going to help.   

Thanks Freddy, your sympathy is appreciated.

Went to a local shop and got one of these.

Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 1 TB Desktop USB 2.0 / USB 3.0

That should be ok for a few years, I must remember, when it starts getting old to replace it before it dies.

Most gutted about loosing my photo collection though, time to start again.

Let me know when you want some of my backup data.

How have you got on with getting the disc to spin up properly?

Snowy told me about a trick to get dead hard drives working again, basically heat it up, which is what I did, first thing was to remove the drive from the external housing then heat it up gently on a radiator then finished it off with a hair dryer, put it in the PC and it works

Have now copied my docs to new drive.

Can't express how happy I am to have my docs back, all my pictures, videos, music,
fewww... that was a close one.

Snowcrash, you are the man

I've heard the opposite can work too....bung it in a freezer then hook up.  I tried that once, I left it in the freezer for a few days...and as if by magic that did not actually work hmm... maybe not good advice 

Hehe 

There is method to the madness, I believe heating them up frees up the grease on the bearing, making it spin smoother, apparently there is software on the drive that detects movement from the disk and shuts it down very quickly to prevent damage to the data.

Something like that.

If an HD has the other fault of not spinning then this method probably wouldn't work.

I am a genius. 

What can I say? And modest too... 

I have succeded getting data off of several drives. Heat and shock seem to help. If bios can't see the drive then you're onto a looser as electronics are dead but all drives park their heads quickly (clunking noise) so they don't damage the disk on a power cut. They also shut down if too much vibration is detected (same noise). Heat and possibly hitting with a shoe or similar seems to help (try just heat first), get data off and throw away.