So my Dad's oldish Win7 laptop stopped booting up. It would get as far as the Starting Windows bit and then everything would go black.
As is the way with the older folks, he has hardly ever used the backup drive I bought him.
I've replaced his HDD with a new SSD and reinstalled Windows7 for him, but he's a bit upset about all the lost photos of the grandkids.
The parental units of said grandkids can replace some of the photos, just not the ones he took himself. 

I put the faulty HDD in an external caddy and it shows up in Explorer with a drive letter but thats about it, no capacity info shows. When you click on the drive Windows asks if you want to format it.
It also makes a clicking sound, about 4 or so clicks then a pause, repeating.

I understand my options are a variety of data recovery services at the cost of mega-bucks, or maybe some software based tools. I've heard rumours involving a freezer and a snap-lock bag.

But if it was your 75 year old father, sitting beside you practically in tears, what would you do?
(PS, we've had the backup talk again already)