Old, sluggish, external HDD

I've had this 500 GB Maxtor (now Seagate. Tells you how old this thing is.) external HDD since around 2008. It's never really given me any issues until now. I think it's starting to show its age. When I plug it in, it takes Windows a few minutes to recognize it. When I click on the drive icon in the My computer window, Windows tries to load the drive, but it just gets hung up and the HDD just sits there and clicks like it's trying to load.

The thing is, I have my two previous computers backed up on this drive and I need to get the information off of it. Is there a tried and true way for getting information off of a sluggish drive?


EDIT
After waiting for some time, I was able to get into the drive. Almost everything on the drive had become corrupted, but it was still there at least. So now, this has turned into a case of fixing the corrupted files and getting them the hell off of that drive. Suggestions?

Does it have it's own power supply? If it's drawing power from USB there may just not be enough power.

I didn't know Maxtor still existed in 2008! I thought they became Seagate much earlier.

As for actually rescuing data, I don't really have any experience doing that out of Linux. In Linux you would want to use ddrescue.

If it wasn't being delivered enough power, it wouldn't run. It sounds like the disk is taking a very long time to spin up. I had an external drive that would do exactly what you described. I could even hear it trying to spin up, the platters spinning faster slowly as it kept trying.

If the warranty is gone for the drive, I'd take it out of the enclosure and plug it directly into the computer. If there was an issue with the enclosure, you could bypass it.

I had what seems to be a similar problem. My drive was a USB drive & I couldn't access it. I took it out of the enclosure & took the USB controller off. I then purchased A esata adapter & plugged it into the sata controller. It has worked fine since.

If it only has marginally enough power, it can behave as described. If the platters are now slightly uneven, it can take higher power to start now, and USB may not be delivering enough.

I have heard something like that when I used an external enclosure with a higher powered drive (could have been 7200 RPM). It would sound like it's constantly trying to spin up. Though in my case it never did.