I have a hard drive that is not detected by the bios - it spins up and
then you hear what sounds like a ping pong ball being dropped into a
tin can "plunk, plunkplunk" and then about 2 seconds later "plunk,
plunkplunk".

Thought this would be a good time to learn and play with a drive (open
it up and check out what's going on).  I figure that there's nothing I
can do to get ANY data off of it - or is there?

To me it sounds like the arm that has the heads on it is trying to
sweep out and read the disk but "plunking" back to the park position -
is this an indication of the controller board going bad?  Anyone know
of a resource where I can read up and figure out what is failing -
I've googled all morning but keep getting hits for data recovery
services....

thanks
john