[SamuraiProgrammer]

Although, I cannot remember any names, I have heard of services that recover data from broken hard drives, if at all possible. These services are not cheap, but some data is worth the expense.

I suspect they will disassemble the hard drive and put it back togehter (in a 'clean' room of course).

As I said... EXPENSIVE. Probably not worth it in this case, but only you can tell.

I have also seen a case where the hard drive controller card was the case. In that instance, leaving the machine on for 10 minutes to allow the circuitry to heat up and then rebooting brought the machine up and we were able to get our data.

Good Luck!