Thought others could benefit from my experience with PCB-Solutions in Canada:

I thought it was all over when my backup drive short circuited after my system crash a couple weeks back. PCB-Solutions in Canada (http://www.onepcbsolution.com/) was able to fix the circuit board (including firmware) for the Seagate drive that went bad and I could keep my data here. The service was very reasonably priced, the turnaround was very quick and they kept me posted every step of the way. All I had to do was screw the circuit board back on the hard drive and use some data recovery software and voila, all my files were available again. This post is my way of saying thank you to PCB Solution and to offer a working solution to anyone else whose hard drive stops spinning.