external 80 gig quit working

[scottatwittenberg]

yeah.. we have a maxtor external 80 gb that just quit working..

it is a 5000LE
5400 rpm..

anyways... it seems like it is stuck or something.. kinda makes a swish sound.. i am trying to get stuff off of it with objectrescue.. it went through the first 20,000 sectors with ease and found 5 files... but now it is taking 30 seconds per cluster and saying it has read errors..
30 seconds x 160million clusters would take a while.. but i am letting it do its thing.. (ok.. it will take over 150 years..)

so what is happening with it?
i have hit hard drives on the side with blunt heavy objects before and got them working again, but i am not quite ready to do it to this one...