You've done about all you can. A USB adapter has a small chance of
helping. Does the drive turn when it's attached to power?
There's a very interesting You Tube video of an HD being turned and read
while hooked up to an electric drill used to rotate the platter, but it
looks a bit iffy. There's also the freezer trick, but I've never had any
luck with it.
As always, the lesson here is bout backing up. 

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [PCBUILD] HDD failure problem
From: KammannFamily <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, October 18, 2009 3:29 pm
To: [log in to unmask]

A few weeks ago, my new Sony Vaio AW-290JAH Windows Vista Home premium
started behaving erratically. At first it simply gave me a BSOD and then
restarted, but after about 4 BSOD's it was taking 2 and 3 tries to get
it to
boot up properly. At this point I decided I needed to get all of my data
off
of my HDD onto an external and figure out where to go from there. About
5
min into the file transfer, my laptop crashed and refused all attempts
to
re-boot. I talked to tech support at Sony and they told my to buy the
recovery disks and see if I could repair the windows installation. The
recovery disks were a complete failure. I then had Sony simply send me a
new
HDD. This means that my computer is now working, but I still don't have
any
of my data. I have 8-10gb of data stuck on my trashed HDD. I also tried
to
boot my computer by making a VistaPE boot disk from my newly installed
HDD.
It would boot up, but the old HDD would not show up as a hard drive. I
also
tried hooking it up through a external enclosure, to no avail. I am
thinking
that the actual mechanical part of the HDD is what is broken, not the
software/drivers on it. I have contacted Sony and have a name of a data
retrieval company that will take my drive apart in a clean room and
manually
read the data off of it. However, this is bound to be expensive. I am
open
to any ideas on how to fix this problem myself (short of building a
clean
room...)
Alex Kammann

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