My MacBook Pro's Internal Hard drive (Mid 2012 Non-Retina) recently started making noises and the laptop pretty much doesn't respond to anything anymore or if it does only very slowly. I am quite sure that the hard drive is in its last breaths and a backup to an external hard drive did not succeed either unfortunately. BIOS recognises drive and windows occasionally detects and installs. However cannot read or access. The heads seem to be cycling around. No clicking i.e. hitting the end stop. Was working fine then failed to boot correctly followed by no access.
What can I/you do to save my files?
The problem with your Macbook Pro sounds very much like bad sectors - parts of the hard disk that can no longer be accessed by the computer. It's a very common problem and far more widespread than you think. The likes of you and I hardly ever notice this or come into contact with it because the hard drive has a built-in bad sector management program that swaps out bad sectors and replaces them with good sectors whenever a bad sector is encountered.
Bad sectors do not go away or diminish, instead they grow as it's the only things they can do, eventually spreading across an entire hard drive. A good guide you can use is the slower your hard drive becomes, the more likely it is to have a high number of bad sectors. If you don't have a backup of your data then bad sectors will eventually lead to you losing all your data.
Retrieving the data from hard drives with bad sectors is possible, but you'll need a data recovery company to do it for you. These company's have specialist pieces of hardware equipment that are able to read 'through' the bad sector and get at the original data underneath. I recommend companies such as this one or http://24hourcomputerrepairs.com/ should you be looking for a data recovery provider.