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Alright, a little while back a drive of mine died while doing some Aftereffects rendering - rendering was taking way longer than usual, and eventually it would hang the machine completely. After a bit, the machine would no longer start up with the drive connected. However, I was able to get the drive (a 120GB WD Caviar) to boot up on another machine. There is a catch though, which is that it only operates for a few minutes before XP hard locks. If I try and restart, it generally will hard lock faster, although if I let the drive cool off for a while unplugged, it seems to help the next attempt some. The drive doesn't make any sort of clicking sounds, so I'm not totally sure what's wrong with it. I've tried putting it in a USB enclosure (no joy, it hard locks the system that way too,) the "freezer method" (doesn't seem to help; although the first boot of the drive each day works better than any subsequent boots even without freezing,) and using a live Linux distribution (Knoppix; it can mount the drive and won't crash when the drive stalls, but unfortunately it can't write to my other NTFS drive. I might just try the slow way though and copy stuff individually to a flash drive.) What else can I try to get this drive working again? There's nothing critical on this drive, but I'd like to recover the data on it if I can (without going the $$$$$ route of professional services.) Thanks for any help! 
Also, I tried moving a small directory over using cut/paste (to help keep track of what had been transferred,) the directory almost finished before the hard drive stalled. When I restarted the machine, not only had that directory disappeared, but all the other directories in the same folder. Is there a good live Linux distribution with some kind of un-delete tool? Edit: Interestingly, I tried ntfsundelete on Windows and it did not show those missing directories as deleted. They show up just fine in various recovery programs, but they're treated like they haven't been deleted. Still, ntfsundelete seems to be a more stable option to recover stuff from the HD; plus I put an ice pack over and under the HD and that seems to help keep it running for longer.
Also, I tried moving a small directory over using cut/paste (to help keep track of what had been transferred,) the directory almost finished before the hard drive stalled. When I restarted the machine, not only had that directory disappeared, but all the other directories in the same folder. Is there a good live Linux distribution with some kind of un-delete tool? Edit: Interestingly, I tried ntfsundelete on Windows and it did not show those missing directories as deleted. They show up just fine in various recovery programs, but they're treated like they haven't been deleted. Still, ntfsundelete seems to be a more stable option to recover stuff from the HD; plus I put an ice pack over and under the HD and that seems to help keep it running for longer.