So I placed my big external 2TB Hitachi HDD upright on a shelf and managed to knock it over (ON the shelf, it didn't fall off of the shelf), but possibly 2 boots after that, it stated clicking like wild and not showing up in Windows.

I didn't have a whole load of ridiculously important data on here, mostly legacy stuff and backups for my main drives, but there is stuff on there that I need and I hadn't even come close to the end of the life cycle of this drive.

Could anyone recommend some good repair places for the drive itself, price-based (assuming most-to-all will do a good job of it)? Or if push comes to shove, I'll settle for data recovery, but the best would be if I can get the drive back to be useable again.

Thanks!

This might be better seen in the computer or hardware section. The clicking usually means the head is searching and can't find the reference point.The tracking mechanism is wonky. Most services that attempt to reclaim the data are very expensive................I hate to say it but, unless you have some very important data it probably isn't worth it.  If you haven't had it long it might qualify for a warranty. HDD makers are probably very conservative in their warranty coverage for obvious reasons.
 

I'm not up to date, but I don't think HDD are considered "repairable" these days. It probably will cost you more to get a quote for the repair, than the cost of the drive it self. I think data recovery from HDD is only viable if it is business critical information, if anybody need to go forensic on your drive to retrieve the information from it ... I'm pretty certain we are talking multiple drives in terms of cost. If you've been lucky and not lost any information, I'm pretty sure getting a new drive and making a new backup is the solution.

Drat! Had a few sample libraries on there.... also realized that all my old, ooold (pre-2016) work was on there (stuff dating back to 2010 maybe, old YouTUbe videos, first attempts as music-making). Not stuff that is going to make a difference, but does hold some value in my heart 
 
On the other hand, it IS a 2TB hard drive that's going to NOT be recovered and would just be wasting space on my shelf.
What else can I do with it then? Not much I guess.. good as trash?

I would put it in the attic. You never know, maybe prices for data recovery will come down in the future. And presumably most of you data is still there. Sentimental value increases with time ... I have a wreck stored away myself. You never know, don't take up much space.

Put it back on the shelf in the same position and then knock it over in the opposite direction and hope for the best . . . can't hurt

Matron Landslide
Put it back on the shelf in the same position and then knock it over in the opposite direction and hope for the best . . . can't hurt

Genius!!!!!

If the drive is "clicking" or "knocking", it's going to be expensive to recover the data.
You'd have to send the drive to company that specializes in Data Recovery.
Even then, there'd be no guarantee that they could recover everything.
 
This is a good reminder; that we all need to maintain multiple copies of important data.

I sent a drive in for data recovery. They wanted over a $1K. I negotiated $600 including the data delivered on a refurbished hard drive (since it 1.5TB of data). 90% of the data was recovered including the most (1TB) critical data.
 
That data is now on a raid 1 NAS. 

You can assume the drive is not going to be repairable for anything like the cost of a new drive. It is a fairly frequent strategy in data recovery to locate an exact match for the defective drive (often not just the same model but the same run) and disassemble, replace the controller, servos or whatever with parts from the twin, and then read out the data to a new drive. So that may qualify as a repair, but it is not going to be cheap and may not be possible. If you have a twin drive and are handy, you could give it a try yourself. While it is possible to read the drive platters in specialized equipment, that is likely to be very costly. In any event the problem you are trying to solve at this point is data recovery, not hard drive repair.