All hard drives are about as delicate as an egg when they're running. It's dead. You can pay a data recovery company to retrieve what little of the data is still intact, but it will cost you a lot of money - not worth it unless there's something particularely precious on it.

Whether the beep is an actual speaker inside the drive that beeps when a serious error is detected, or if it is just a side-effect of the heads scraping on the platters, is of little importance.

For your next drive, buy a good one. I buy almost exclusively from Seagate and WD. Maxtor just doesn't make good hard drives.