My harddrive in my inspiron 1300 crashed.

My harddrive stopped working and i want to send it to a data recovery specialist im wondering if they will be able to surf through my files and look through my personal info?

This drive's platters were seized and would not spin up. 1- I carefully opened the cover, and powered up the drive. 2- I gave the platters a little twist and they spun up. 3- I quickly copied the data normally to another disk. 4- The drive died 90% thru copy process. 90% is pretty good. 5- don't try this at home unless you are ready to scrap your drive and lose all data. This is an absolute last resort.

I took apart this hard drive as a demonstration for a high school history class. The drive had no read errors on the floor of my dusty room, when I was testing file copy (lucky??).

Ok, sofar I am seeing a lot of questions about recovering corrupted drives, etc. My laptop recently took a dive off of a table and lets just say the connection for the power supply is rolling around inside it someplace. Still booted fine with the battery however that is obviously dead and unable to be charged now. I had bought an external shell for the laptop hard-drive that connected via USB in the past (same laptop had lost one hard-drive over the years). My desktop sees the new device when it is plugged in, I hear the hard-drive making noise inside the external case, but cannot seem to access it or anything. Anyone have ideas/suggestions? I would really love to get my scuba diving photos off this little hard-drive without having to buy a whole new laptop, and from what I have been told nobody wants to even try repairing the current broken one.

My computer has a virus and I can't turn it on without it crashing. I don't have any of the stuff on my hard drive back up (I know, stupid) and there are very important files on there that I need. Is there anyway that I can retrieve the data on my hard drive?

So my hard drive in my computer crasher and the company (acer) sent me a new blank harddrive and recovery disc since it's still under warranty.
Now when I insert the recovery disc it says "windows is loading files" but freezes up at one point and doesn't go any further. is it frozen or does it just take a while for it to progress. can someone please walk me through this process. If needed I can give you my email and we can exchange messages if it's too much to put here..i really need the help!
and yes the hard drive IS installed correctly.

THANK YOU!

questions per mail to me: HSF_austria@live.de THX (C) Checker-Studios

After having to force reboot my Asus laptop, I was unable to boot into Windows. I had it looked at by a professional and he believes that the hard-drive is finally dead. So I was wondering how expensive it is to get a professional to fix the physical hard-drive so I can recover all my files.