Recommendatins for Hard Disk Recovery

Try knoppix!
Knoppix is the best thing out there to retrieve data from dead (or kind of dead) hard drives. Knoppix is a software that has the entire linux OS on a CD. You can go to http://www.knoppix.net to download the software and burn a CD. Once you have the CD ready, you would boot your computer (with the dead hard drive) using the knoppix CD. You would be in the linux environment at this point and you can see all the hard drives on ur computers as folders (you would need to do some figuring out of /dev/sda, /dev/sdb etc.) Once you see your hard disk, you can copy the files from that folder to any where on the network.

I had the same problem before. I had Comet Systems in South San Francisco replace a new hard drive for me. Comet is also an authorized repair shop for Compaq and many other brand name computers.

Check Craigs list for "Data Recovery". You have a lot of people in bay area that provide those services for as little as $99, depending on the type of failure you have on your disk. There are certain things you can do before you approach a service provider, but it depends on how much risk you want to take as everytime you do something on your own to recover you might be making the disk even worse at which point you might not have a way out to recover the data at all.

I have recovered few of my hard disks myself. Basically there are several softwares available that you can download over internet. There are some companies who can recover drives over the internet also.

You should definitely avoid Lazares Data Recovery in San Francisco. They took three months to let me know that nothing was recoverable from my disk after charging me $1600.00 for various parts. It's one big money lurking m/c to avoid.