the tickeling sound is more than likely your hard drive. the best way to recover the data would be a program such as steve gibson's spinrite -
www.grc.com costs $89, but i'm pretty sure that you are not iwlling to spend that type of money on a program to recover the data.
Now with that said, does the hard drive light (usually orange light on front of case, which blinks when hard drive is being read or written to) stay on when this is occuring? that would mean there is most likely an issue with your hard disk, if you are hearing noises from inside the computer, thats most probably the case,