I don't think the data recovery places care terribly much what's on the HDD - they gain nothing from reporting you, plus they want a good reputation so they have little reason to really care (well, maybe the tech guy might decide to copy a few of the things for himself >_>).
Most likely it's a broken head so they should easily be able to recover your data, though I don't know the costs.

Otherwise, if you're not willing to do that, you could try opening the drive and fiddling around with it, after all, there's nothing to lose...

(This post was last modified: 19/02/2009 02:24 AM by ZiNgA BuRgA.)