I've had amazing results with
Active Undelete in the past. I don't have their current product, but I was able to use their software to recover about 95% of what I wanted to from a disk drive with "platter splatter" (klack, klack, klack as you put it).
My wife freaked out when all of our pictures (we went fully digital in 2001) were on the drive and not backed up anywhere. I got all of the pictures back, and most of the other data on the computer.
I will say this, with Active Undelete at least, it tries over and over to get the data that in my case it took DAYS of it working before it had a record of what was on the failed drive and another day or so recovering the data. Well worth it though.
Now, after 2 failed hard drives in the past 6 years, I have a 320GB main drive and a 160GB backup drive and I do weekly full backups and nightly incremental backups (to get just the changed files). I also have things like our pictures on 2 sets of DVDs for each year. One stays at our house, and the other is at my parent's house 200 miles away. I've heard it said that in case of a disaster, like a house fire or something, the most wanted thing that is lost (assuming nobody was hurt) is memories and photos. I'm not planning for a doomsday, but I just don't want to ever deal with not having a set somewhere when it costs so little to make my own "off-site copy".
So if you haven't already, go buy a new hard drive (unless you have an extra laying around or already bought one), get the base computer up and going, run one of these tools, get your data back, and then get another drive and do backups to prevent this nightmare in the future. Drives are so inexpensive anymore that your time is worth more than the cost of a drive.
Good luck, and let us know which product you end up using and how it goes.
