Anyone know of a Good harddrive data recovery company?

[Firewrath]

Sooo yeah,
from my title im sure you can guess what happened. :P
so Does anyone here know of a Good Harddrive data recovery service?

Preferably one that Will Not go through my stuff, as ive got a semi-half written book in there, some information on other such like things from a friend of mine thats a writer, some old private files from were i worked (yes, its ok that i have them, :P), some C++ code that im semi-working on for someone and ofcourse some personal things, phone numbers, pictures, and so on, (most of the pics and the like i have backed up from March 09, but its the rest of the stuff i really need)
i found this place:
http://www.datarecoverygroup.com/index.htm
which seems to be what im looking for, ...but i'd like to have some second opinions or other options if needed.

over at GRC (which this post is mostly a copy of, :P),
i got links to these two:

http://www.retrodata.co.uk/

https://services.seagate.com/


RetroData is required by some UK law or some such to keep the data private,
which is a plus, buuut, im in the States, so i dont know how that would work,

And i couldnt find Any kind of privacy bit from Seagate so that makes me wary of them,

(an yeah, im a semi-security nut already, so im not all that wild about trusting such things to other people, and i wouldnt normally, but i Need some of these files, >.<)



Anyways,
My harddrive bit the dust, in like 5minutes flat. -_-
it went from this:
3:34:26 AM Disk Error None 7 N/A The device, \Device\Harddisk1\D, has a bad block.

to this:
3:34:44 AM Disk Warning None 51 N/A An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk6\D during a paging operation.

to dead,
each a couple of times ofcourse, but all in about 5min or so, (7 if you want to get picky, :P)
no, its not the 'D:' hard drive and its not harddrive number 7 or 6 ...as '\Device\Harddisk5\D' is in there,
its windows error logging, what do you expect? -_-
(it is #2 Technically but yeah,)

it is an external seagate 160gig HD, (L: , not D: , if it matters, :P)
(funny sidenote: ive been laid off for a while (as most of you at TPFC already know, :P),
got some money around Christmas which i used to buy a 1.5 TB HD to back up this drive and my comp,
it was working the night before, but i was tired and put it off till morning, ...sat down at the computer in the morning to back everything up, then *Poof* my HD killed itself.
Lesson: This is what you get for being lazy. :P ( ...and im sure it only having about 500meg freespace didnt help any, so dont do that either, :P))

so the BIOS wont detect it, the thing just spins up and tries to read if left plugged into the comp,
so i uhh *ahem* downloaded SpinRite since its supposed to handle this kind thing, :P
it actually doesnt detect it either, ...which i found out after some playing with the program,
(Also tried (Very Carefully) freezing it as thats supposed to let it read within better tolerances and if it could just read that bad sector long enough to give me 5-10min of working time, i would have been good, but no. -_-)

So side note, only because ive had to explain this before, :P
if the harddrive wont 'start up' and the computer Wont detect the drive, then no program out there will work on it,


So if any of you guys could help me, id rather appreciate it,
or even if any of you know anything about the three companys i listed, i figure i'll try to get a quote from each to check the pricing and all, but keeping my data private trumps price,
(not that im likely able to afford it anyways, but wont know till i atleast ask, ...and my HD should 'keep' as long as i dont try to do anything with it,)


But eitherway, Thanks for your guy's time, ^-^
mostly for going through another long winded post of mine about some problem or another, :P

[freakazoid]

You could try replacing the circuit board on your hard drive.
It must match the existing circuit board though.

Do a search about circuit boards and hard drives to find out more.

You'll have to open up your hard drive to find the model # and exact make.
When you've found your model # and make, try eBay to find your circuit board.

[-.-]

this will probably kill your hdd but if you put it in a bag and put it in freezer overnight, in morning take it out fast and you might be able to get it to work long enough to transfer files to another hdd

[Firewrath]

You could try replacing the circuit board on your hard drive.
It must match the existing circuit board though.

i had admittedly thought about this,
but given it started as a 'bad sector' error and the drive spins up and 'seeks',
im thinking the board is fine and its what it says it is, or the head,
i will probably look into this before sending it off somewhere though,
as that will probably cost me $800 or more and a board shouldnt cost me more then $20 or so,

this will probably kill your hdd but if you put it in a bag and put it in freezer overnight,

Yeah, i tried this,

(Also tried (Very Carefully) freezing it as thats supposed to let it read within better tolerances and if it could just read that bad sector long enough to give me 5-10min of working time, i would have been good, but no. -_-)

sadly it didnt work,
thanks for the suggestion though, ^-^

[-.-]

maybe try these? I havent used them before, but heard they were pretty good, also has a free trail too
http://www.diskinternals.com/ntfs-recovery/
http://www.diskinternals.com/partition-recovery/

[webfork]

I have friends that have used Ontrack - www.ontrackdatarecovery.com. I do not work for Ontrack and have never used them myself.

No hard drive data recovery will be cheap. Get ready to shell out some serious money.

The freezer trick that was mentioned *really does work* ... sorry it didn't work that time for you.

And good luck.