Learn more about data recovery on physically damaged drives

[N00bish1]

Hi folks,

hope this is the right place to ask this. I'm very curious to learn more about how to diagnose and fix physical drive errors. The matter is that most providers make a huge secret out of it. It's hard to find courses at all and even if you do find it is very hard to judge which course is worth it, as it is to judge which recovery provider actually know what he is doing.
Several recovery providers do not even respond to a simple email on how to gain knowledge or how to start working in that field.

Can you recommend courses and/or companies that are willing to hire beginners eager to learn in this field?
I'm curious about the market in general, but for my personal perspective I am mainly interested in options in central europe.

As a kind of "journeyman's piece" I have an old 80gig IDE drive which makes abrading noises and a same-type functional drive. "nice to have back" type of data. I am not willing to spend like 1.500 bugs on the recovery, but I would consider learning and getting equipment worth some 1.000s of bugs.

thanks