Yes, but I think he is trying to avoid taking the HDD to a recovery company. They charge way to much to recover data, of course if that data is very important and can't be recreated then that would...

I don't know if you saw the whole thin or not, but here are the suggestions that they give in the article.

Freeze it
Drop it
Hit it

You have tried freezing it, but have you tried the...

Yes, that is true, there is only one lens for the DVD drive. Maybe i confused you, but what I meant was to try to clean the lens of the DVD drive. The link I gave above is to a web page that shows...

I don't think changing the USB port is going to work. I have encountered this type of problems a lot here at work and the only solution I have found was to reformat the drive. Once I have reformatted...

We need more answers. Do you have both the OS HDD (hard drive) and the external hard drive connected at the same time or are you trying to connect the external HDD by itself? If you have tried both...

Here you can find at least 200 ways that might work for you to try to revive your HDD for just the right amount of time to copy your files. The most important thing is BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP. Trust...

Have you tried cleaning the lens of your CD or DVD ROM? Don't touch it, if you don't have a CD that cleans the lens of the CD & DVD ROMs, you can use a compressed gas duster can. I have had problems...

Here is a solution that Microsoft has. You might want to try it.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;831426