Samsung Spinpoint 250ji - recoverable?

[daniel.siddle]

First off I apologise for my lack of knowledge. I'm afraid my knowledge of HDDs is relatively limited - although I have started reading the doc on the inside of HDDs found through the forum. Anyway I'm hoping that someone may be able to offer some advice:

Story so far...

I have a Samsung Spinpoint 250ji which I was using as an external hard drive for my laptop (I run Ubuntu 8.04) for 8months or so without any problems. I put a DVD Writer into my laptop to start backing up everything on the drive (maybe around 60Gb data). When I plugged my drive in it failed to recognise the drive. It made slight repetitive clicking noises (cue me starting to worry). I then tried it on a windows machine as an external drive, and also tried plugging it directly into a SATA desktop and my laptop which also takes SATA. None of the utils I ran from UBCD or System Rescue CD seemed to do anything. I packed the drive away and did nothing further to it (final exams and work got in the way). When I got the drive out the other day and tried to plug it in it made no noise whatsoever. At this point I had pretty much decided that it was as dead as dead can be. My brother who knows a great deal more about computers than I do suggested it was maybe worth switching the board and trying it. I bought a replacement drive of the same model and tried this but even once the board was switched the BIOS fails to recognise that there is an hard drive attached.

So....
My question is do I have any hope of recovering any of the data?
The data isn't valuable or confidential, however a great deal of it is irreplaceable (primarily photos which I thought I had other copies of)
Is there anything else I can try at home to get the data off this or am I talking about sending it to a company with a clean room?
If the latter can people suggest any places that are particularly good and also give me some idea of exactly what I am likely to pay?
I imagine the cost of sending it away will be prohibitive, however I thought it was worth asking.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be welcome. If there is any other specific information you would like just post it and I will update it as soon as I can.

Regards,

Daniel Siddle

[daniel.siddle]

sorry meant hm250ji

[pcimage]

If it's clicking, it's very likely to be bad heads so a PCB swap would not help at all.

Assuming the bad heads haven't damaged the platters, then we can recover it as we have full cleanroom facilties etc...