Repairing Maxtor hard drive - possible to DIY?

I have a pile of old drives from some P3's I have just retired, and am going through them one by one to make sure there is no data on them I need before I reformat them and give them away or use them to back images etc. up to. I bought one of those inexpensive external drive bays that hook up via USB as its a lot easier than constantly replacing drives and rebooting, and it works quite well.

I have 2 Maxtor Drives, one 20GB and one 40GB - both of them make that dreaded "clunking" sound when powered up, but after that it does sound like they start to spin, but I'm not 100% sure. Anyway, the laptop I am using to read them will not see these disks, not even in the disk management module. I was wondering if its possible that there could be something obvious I could see if I popped the cover off. I've got the external drive bay taken apart so that the drive is just sitting on the table, so it is in plain view when I power it up. Can the disk be run with the cover off?

I have some photo's that I can't find that may be on one of these disks, but there is nothing on them critical enough that I'd pay money to get them recovered, so I really have nothing to lose, and I am curious about taking them apart. Is there anything obvious to look for with the cover off the drive?

thanks!
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