[SGVLUG] Harddrive Recovery Firms

[Mic Chow]

Folks,

I have gotten into a situation with a laptop hard drive.  It has died,
and no there is not a decent backup.  The drive is a Fujitsu MHS2060AT.
 It is not even being detected by the BIOS anymore.  Physically, I can
hear the drive spinning, but I can not hear the read/write head move.  I
have tried the freezer trick with this drive. (Air tight plastic bag to
contain the drive and put the drive in a freezer overnight)  I have had
success with this technique to recover other drives, but this no joy
with this one.  The 12-inch desk drop also did not help.  After doing
both separately, I mounted the drive again with a ATA/IDE to USB cable
to a boot from a knoppix 5.01 CD.  The KDE desktop does not show the
drive, qparted also does not show the drive.  Interestingly enough
sfdisk does give me something.

sfdisk -s /dev/sdb give me a value of 0
sfdisk -l /dev/sdb gives:
   cannot read sector 0
   /dev/sdb: unrecognized partition table type
   No partitions found

If I read this right, the electronics on the hard drive seems to be
working right, or at least as far as the kernel can see it does.
However, it can not see the platters, or the data on the platters.

The drive is a single not-bootable partition with a file system of NTFS.

I do not have a spare drive with exactly the same electronics or even
the same revisions of the drive controllers, so it looks like I need to
send this out to a data recovery center.  Is there anything else I can
try at home to recover?  What if any experience has any of the members
here had with data recovery outfits?  Who do would you suggest?  Are the
all fixed on the $500 range or is that the initial rate and they go up
from there?


Suggestions?

Thanks in Advance.
Mic
North Hollywood, CA
N34° 8'33.02"
W118° 21'39.62"