Well, I've got the same problem:
All of a sudden I get odd music from my pc, which went away once it got into WinXP. I noticed that my 5 partitions of my 160 Gig Maxtor Diamondmax 9 drive were missing, so I wen to reboot. This time I noticed an odd POST beep as well, and that the Promise IDE card that came with the Maxtor 160 Drive was not recognizing it. Then, I reset the BIOS to see if there was something there causing this. It took the odd POST beep away, but did not fix this. I tried putting it in another computer (no help), and through USB, hoping that it would do the recognition of the drive differently, and thus work. As with others, this did not help. I bought another drive, of the same series, hoping that if I swapped the circuit boards, this would help (thinking that the drive wasn't being seen because of a faulty board). However, I could not find the screw drivers I've used in the past to take appart hard drives. I tried hex (both SAE and metric), but none fit.
Today I found this site! I will try your suggestion of twisting, then tapping. I'll leave Freezer as last resort. I had already sent for an RMA as my warranty is about to expire. Hopefully I can get the data off.
As far as what caused it? I think I remember hearing odd clicks from the computer this used to be connected to in the past, but shrugged it off as fans (very loud system). The clicking would stop after a soft tap on the computer case. The clicking didn't happen on the system I moved this drive to though (HTPC). Other than that, I recently had taken the drive out of this new system to try to troubleshoot the primary hard drive on it. While this drive was out of the system, I twisted the drive and noticed that I would hear something moving in it. I hoped it was just the platters spinning and nothing more, but I feared it was the platters spinning and the heads touching part of it. I dont' remember if the heads are supposed to touch near the edge of the platter when parked, but I always figured that the platters would not spin while unpowered. In any case, this drive worked fine for a couple of days past that. I did have one time where I shut down using power button, but I thought that drive worked fine since then. I can't remember how many days ago that happened.
In any case, I'll post back after I try fixing it tonight. (I'm sure it'll be a shorter post)
