hi my my 1TB WD hard drive started producing some scratching noises and my computer also cant read it and it has very importan

[Carolyne]

My passport WD external hard drive keeps producing some scratching noises, my computer recognizes that a hard drive has been detected, but it cant read it or open it. so what do i do it has some really important documents.

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

Unless the drive can be accessed you won't be able to recover any data from it, not even with data recovery software.
You could try putting the drive in to a different enclosure, but I believe the drive itself is damaged.

Regarding data loss - - I am always telling people never to rely on just one hard drive. You should have saved identical copies of your data on at least two hard drives. I use four external hard drives to save identical copies of my data.