Your chances of recovering your data are close to nothing, from what I've heard. If the drive is ticking, there's a good chance the drive heads are damaged and unable to move properly. I had a power failure recently that took out one of my external drives housed in an enclosure. I had to end up RMA'ing the drive back to Seagate for a refurbished one (thankful for 5 year warranties.) Data recovery will run you a few thousand, most likely, and even then, they probably won't be able to recover much if any.
Take it as a lesson learned about making backups. I have a 500GB Seagate FreeAgent that I manually back-up my important files every month, then unhook it and store it in its box in my closet (would be better if I had an off-site location to store it.) I use the program Nero BackItUp to do the backups. It scans my watch folders for new files created/modified since the last backup and copies them over, so I don't have to worry about remembering what all is backed up.
You can also run a RAID1 backup, which uses 2 hard drives and keeps identical data on them. Then if one fails, the other picks up without you even realizing it.
Good luck!