I had thought that my Fantom drive was mostly dead because it simply made the clicking sound of death-- not wanting to wake up.
Then, before I came back to Taiwan, a friend of mine found out that it was the enclosure that went bad.
Today, I got a new enclosure for the drive and-- the drive is no longer naked and is back alive!
Miracle!
The enclosure I got was made by Philips. The whole process was simple and straightforward.
There was only a minor glitch... the first time I plugged it in to the laptop running Windows 7, I was shown an installation failure error message. So I turned the drive off and plug it in to another USB slot. This time, it took a minute or two getting things set up and has been working perfectly since... (So far so good)
Interestingly, it seems like enclosures of this brand are not sold in the US. At least I can't find it on the web.
The moral of the lesson, though God forbids, next time your external drive does the same thing, check and see whether it is the problem of the enclosure before sentence the hard drive to... adios.
One more thing I learned was-- the 3.5 enclosure could actually be cheaper in the US while the 2.5 could be cheaper in Taiwan. $$$$$
