hard drive surgery 1

[otter17]

I recently suffered from a hard drive (it's data only) crash--I booted up one day to hear some sickening clicking and grinding of metal from my usually trusty 4.5 Gb UltraWide SCSI Seagate Barracuda. Windows booted up and the device manager showed the Seagate drive was there; however, it did not have a drive letter and I could not access the drive. My SCSI manager can see the drive, but FDISK does not recognize the drive. Data recovery services have given me quotes of $650+ with only an 80% chance of recovery. I would like to purchase a drive of the same model (only $99) and transplant the old platters into the new drive. Okay, my apartment is not a class 100 clean room; however, $99 and a slim chance of recovery seams more viable than $650 for data that is important, but not critical. Has anyone attempted such feats of recovery? Any advice?

 

[tekxone]

I have a IBM 60G-IDE hard drive that just died. It's
making spinning noises. After rebooting the computer
twice, the noise will not go away, and now the hard
drive does not come up in the system BIOS.
- I tried the HD in the freezer trick
(1 hour) still nothing.
- I did a swap of master/slave.
- I tried it on different and other systems.
- I've lightly tapped it a few times

I was wondering is there anything else I can try?

Does the freezer trick have to be longer, like
8 hours as someone suggested, can that length of
time in the freezer cause ANY or even MORE damage?

Does the freezer trick only work if the hard drive
is still recognized in the BIOS?

Can anyone help or suggest any other safe method?
I'm not skilled with opening hard drives up /
swapping parts so that's out to.

I've been quoted over the phone if I'm willing to pay
big bucks to recover any data I might have a shot.
Hey lets face it I'm not a rich guy so that's not
the way to go for me!

I'd like to recover as much data as possible!
HELP PLEASE
Thanks