I've done a bit of limited data recovery for myself and friends, mainly using DD Rescue and either Testdisk or Photorec (basically an amateur). However my free assistance has been limited to situations where the hard drive is somewhat readable. A friend asked me to look at her crashed hard drive to see if I can pull off any documents and pictures since she has limited backups and even more limited money to pay for data recovery. The hard drive isn't readable on Windows or Linux so I wasn't able to grab an image. My first question whenever I help is if they are going to send their drive to a professional (I don't want to make the situation worse). When I asked my friend she replied she wouldn't. I figured since the drive was going to go into the trash anyway, I opened it up to see what was going on in there.

Luckily the platter is in good condition and the heads don't look like they crashed. Since I don't have a cleanroom I opened it inside of a zip lock bag. I did notice that when you powered on the drive it didn't click but the head stack assembly would move over the platters and then park until you power-cycled the drive again. Low and behold my friend now decided she might want to send it to a professional.

This board has been extremely helpful in the past so I figured I'd ask the professionals. Is something like what I explained even reasonably repairable and is this something I can do myself (assuming no) or does it have to go to a recovery company? Sorry for being wordy but any help is appreciated

Howard

opening the drive even in zip lock bag is a bad idea
powering it up with an open lid is even worse

Now, regarding DIY, you didn't described the symptoms of the drive - and I'm referring before you have opened it - , like does it spin up, clicking, beeping, stays spinning Etc. what model is it.
But now after opening it and running it with the lid open its another story.
my advice would be if the data is important then send it to DR pro.

Sorry, the drive basically just made a spinning sound. There was no clicking or beeping. Aside from it not working, it didn't really sound any different. The sounds were the same both before and after opening it. As for why I opened it, at the time we were just going to trash it since I wasn't able to get an image off of it. It wasn't until after opening it that my friend asked about sending it somewhere. The drive is a Hitachi 5k500 b-320 (320gb) if that helps.