I just had a 2.5" wd blue 500G drive die on my wife's Lenovo. The HDD make repeated clicking/chattering noises and for all intents and purposes was dead. I put the drive into the second sata bay of my Clevo laptop and windows disk manager showed it was recognized as a drive but could not register or access any volumes. This told me it most likely wasn't the HDD's circuit board.
Im pretty gifted at fixing things so with nothing to lose I removed the HDD's cover which revealed the platters. I noticed the head was parked in the middle of the platter. Very carefully I swung the head assembly back to its power off position. I buttoned everything back up, powered it on and to my suprise it was working!!! I scanned the disk for errors and none were found. Even though I had an incredible stroke of luck Im taking no chances, Im making recovery discs and will probably install a SSD.