Dead hard drive. I have backups, but what are some ways I could try to read the drive?

I'm feeling adventurous. My Seagate ST3500320AS 500 GB SATA2 drive with Windows 7 on it just died, but I want to see if I can read it. I do have backups.

* Prior to this complete failure, resuming from hibernation had begun to take an exceptionally long time. * Twice on separate days I turned on the computer only (from completely off) to hear a grinding noise from the hard drive area. Turning it off and cold booting after spin-down resulted in the noise disappearing. It only happened after the computer was off for most of the day. * It was on all last evening and last night with no problems. * Immediately before this failure, I booted to Windows and launched PassMark DiskCheckup (which showed no abnormalities the other day). I got a BSOD and the BIOS stopped seeing the drive's model name. * PartedMagic live CD saw the partition names and sizes earlier. It got I/O errors when trying to mount the partitions. * No longer detected in BIOS. Earlier it was being detected, but upon booting to Windows the system would automatically restart after the logo screen and the drive model name would be missing. Cold boot fixed this, but now it's gone for good. * It spins up.

Edit: interesting, I just heard a grinding sound again, except I identified one of the intake fans (in front of the drives) as the source. Maybe the noise I heard was the fan and not the drive.