[tlug] Hard Drive Failure (Was: Help! Total hardware failure)

[Dave M G <dave@example.com>]

TLUG,

Sorry for starting a new thread on the same topic, but I'm just sorting 
out my email access, so I can't reply from the same place I was at before.

Anyway... the current deal is that I've bought a new hard drive and I'm 
setting my whole system up again.

I have backups of my most precious data, so this hard drive failure is 
more like losing a kidney than losing a lung. It sucks hard, but won't 
kill me.

Still, as time passes I keep realizing there are various things I've 
worked on recently that I did not back up, and I'd really like to 
recover them.

I tried the freezer technique, and it did make it so that the clicking 
noise in the hard drive went away, but the computer did not read the drive.

I also bought "Spinrite", supposedly a highly recommended hard disk data 
recovery software, but it did not read the drive either.

Since I bought a new hard drive, I tried mounting the old one as a 
secondary disk, hoping that maybe it could be read even if I can't boot 
from it. No luck there.

Is there anything else I can do?

Ian recommended getting a USB SATA interface, which I would gladly pay 
for, but I'm wondering if it will do anything qualitatively different 
that will up my chances of seeing any disk data.

I'm not sure what my budget is for this, but I would lay down some cash 
to get the data off this drive. From what I can tell though, 
professional services ask many thousands of dollars for this kind of thing.

Any recommendations or advice would be really appreciated.

--
Dave M G