[John Rogers]

A real data recover center should be able to pull the disk(s) and unless the surface has been physically scrapped or gouged then they can get the info. The noise you heard is the "click of death" and I would guess they tried replacing the circuit board and that nearly never helps fix the issue.

Way back in 1993, when I was the staff IT director at COMNAVAIRPAC in San Diego we had a financial PC get the dreaded click and we had our contractors try to recover it and finally went to Disk Doctor in San Diego who was just starting out. They pulled the disk platters and recovered all the spreadsheets. It was NOT cheap and in the end we installed several dozen backup drives and also setup network based backups and never had another issue.