Hard drive data recovery?

[Borg561]

So, the main hard drive in my laptop crapped out yesterday without any apparent warning. It was working fine before I went to work. When I got home, the screen was black, and upon reboot the computer doesn't recognize the drive (secondary drive is fine). Threw the drive in my tower and on boot it's showing "HDD S.M.A.R.T. Error" and Windows doesn't recognize the drive.

Now, I'm not really worried about losing my Windows install (I was planning to do a fresh install soon anyway), but a lot of my music, pictures, videos, and other documents are on that drive (yeah, no backup). One of the data recovery companies recommended by the drive manufacturer lists a minimum cost of $500/drive, the other doesn't list any prices. Does anyone know of a data recovery company that is cheaper? I could probably stomach $150-200 or so (yes, I realize it's a lot of work to do this), but considering it's going to cost almost $100 just for a replacement drive, I don't want to spend too much.

Justin

[3.2TI]

Date recovery can run up thousands with no guarantee. You should try running a scandisk command to see if it picks it up. If not try getting yourself another computer and an external SATA drive case and connect the bad drive as a usb and see if the data is accessible. Been there many times...

[bmvw]

Check under control panel> administrative tools> disk management and see if the drive is there. If so try a sector recovery tool. I've used Restorer 2000 successfully many times to get data back.

[pdxmotorhead]

Go into the BIOS and turn off S.M.A.RT. It should work for a while. SMART is just a timer that stops use of the drive based on access and runtime numbers. I've done this on multiple drives. one of them is still working like 2 years later...

Dave