one day my external hard drive just stopped showing up in my my computer page, it still shows up in the device manager page, but a lot of functions like roll back driver, update driver, that kind of stuff are greyed out, when i right click the my computer icon and go to manage, the hard drive shows up (sometimes) but it doesnt initialize, the hard drive makes sounds of winding up 3 times, and then it goes silent.  this is all the diag i get from when i use it on my windows machine (its formatted in ntfs), when i plug it into a mac, it simply says that the drive cannot be read. please help! its a Fantom Greendrive 1TB, it has a 2 year warranty, and i bought it back in 2009.     

I'm not certain if its dead, but if it is and you have valuable memory which you might not be able to retrieve when turning it in for the warranty, you can pry it open and save your HDD memory. Of course, this is only the most desperate measures when you're certain its dead, when the warranty is over and you've got some stuff you'd like to retrieve from that HDD.
 

It sounds dead to me. When you hear weird sounds like clicking and stuff, it means it's about to die.

The clicking is a sign of inevitable death. If you're getting anything at all from it, salvage everything you want to keep and don't put anything new on it. Just realistically speaking, don't ever expect an external HD to last more than 2 years.