data recovery (in Off-topic)

Grant's external HFS+ (OS X) disk died Monday. (It's a normal 3.5" ide disk in a firewire enclosure.) His powerbook doesn't even see the disk anymore; hook it up to a PC desktop and the bios doesn't see it either.

So I'm pretty sure at this point that software-based solutions aren't going to help. Does anyone have any experience with one of the dozen-plus companies eager to take your money for data recovery?

Just to clarify, have you removed the hard drive from the case and tried connecting it directly by IDE cable, instead of the fire wire connection?

I'm not sure at all, but my disk died once... Fortunately I had another disk EXACTLY like the one that died. My friend helped me to change the head of the disk to back-up my stuff, it worked just fine! Pretty hard but saves money before sending it to a company, if that's the problem!

I've had to deal with this before. A trick my old boss taught me (which has worked several times) was to stick the drive in a freezer, then power it up in the machine and give the drive a quick little shot to the side. I dont know why it works sometimes, but it does. Im assuming at this point youve hooked the drive up directly to your IDE channel and that didnt work.

You might just want to try purchasing the exact same model hard drive online somewhere and just swap out circuit boards because if it involves opening up the drive to remove platters and whatnot it's usually pretty pricey. I've only tried out sourcing once, I think the company was OnTrack. It was actually cheaper for us to pay our programmer to replicate 2 weeks worth of work then it was to have OnTrack fix the drive just to give you an idea on price.

Does the drive spin up?
Any particular circumstances when it died? I.e. was data being manipulated or did it just fail to start?
Does it have that wonderful ozone smell of burnt components?

Drive spins up. Sometimes thrashes.

I recommend a base ball bat. Oh wait, you WANT the data?......

Still base ball bat.

What's on it? Just curious.