Actually I just called them and I let them know about my problem, let him hear the noise and he said that I would definitely have to send it in. I told him that I need to recover the data on the drive and he told me I could go through a data recovery service near my area and they charge around $300 - $1500 on average, depending on how much data needs to be recovered. Well I have around 90gb of fansubs and stuff on it thus far so I was thinking of just buying another Maxtor for around $120 or so and somehow magically making my current fault drive work long enough to copy all the stuff over to the new one.
So I've read up above about how ScottW got his to work, I was wondering if you could elaborate on that. And if that doesn't work - what are the chances that it will work if I "freeze" it? AND I'm thinking that I'll need it to be spinning for at least an hour to give me enough time to recover everything.