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[Alex Atkin UK]

I actually knocked one of my backup drives off a shelf while it was running a few months back, it jammed the head.

I've been meaning to give it another whack to see if I can revive it and use it for unimportant data such as game installs, though I suspect the platters are probably pretty trashed.

[licquorice]

Why accept defeat, just try a Linux live distro, its not difficult. If it works it works, if it doesn't you are no worse off.

[tubaman]

Why accept defeat, just try a Linux live distro, its not difficult. If it works it works, if it doesn't you are no worse off.

Agree - nothing to lose and you might even find that you like Linux. I'm typing this on an old HP laptop running Linux Mint and which does everything I need for everyday use. I do use Win10 as well but if that disappeared tomorrow I could certainly keep going quite happily with this.
The modern distros are plug-and-play on the whole and no more challenging to install than Windows. A live distro as mentioned just boots from USB or DVD so doesn't need you to actually install it at all.
 

[Floydoid]

Now I come to think of it, the problem could be mechanical, as I used to hear an occasional click coming from the tower, say 2/3 times a day, but since I removed the errant drive (2 days ago) I've not heard it at all.  I didn't bother to try and investigate as it could have some from anywhere, or just been the result of a bit of thermal expansion somewhere.

[Alex Atkin UK]

The clicking is not always indicative of a failing drive these days, all the drives in my NAS make the odd noise that at first had me going "oh crap, is a drive failing".  Of course that depends, if its a LOUD click like the head suddenly smashing into the spindle, that could be.

[parkdale]

Seagate drives have the ticking heads/chirping noise when reading... always makes me nervous 

[Floydoid]

It was a WD.

[Chrysalis]

Today I had to remove one of the SATA drives from my machine - the one I use for backups and archive storage. Anyway Windows was so long booting up this morning, even trying a scan and repair of the errant drive before getting to the desktop, but Windows had more or less ground to a halt because it was struggling to recognise the drive, so physical removal was the quick fix solution.  I found my old hard drive USB caddy and popped it in there to try it, but once again Windows was not recognising it and things ground to a halt.

So my question is, what are my options if Windows won't recognise it to the point where I could try some recovery and repair tools?  I'd like to be able to recover the data as some of it is quite valuable and I've accumulated it over a long period of time.

Nobody backs up their backups, right?

So to understand its more like an archive than a backup? a backup is a backup of data you have elsewhere, and I am guessing some of this data is "only" in your backup?

If the drive is in a bad enough state that the OS is struggling to even recognise it, then its past the point of any advice I could offer, so I only offer you best of luck in recovering it.

After its recovered consider a cloud service to backup, its probably more £££ efficient to use something like onedrive or backblaze, than buying physical hardware to backup data, especially considering you would have to routinely replace that hardware every X years as well.