2/20    My hard drive just died. It was a Maxtor 27 GB, and as far as I can
        tell there is something physically/mechanically wrong with the drive,
        it's not just a software/boot record problem. Is there any way to get
        some of my data back? How much do "data recovery" services cost?
        what's a good kind of hard drive to get so this never happens to me
        again?
        \_ 1) Yes  2) More than you're willing to pay  3) It's called
           "backup"
                \_ anyone care to actually provide a helpful answer? (I do
                   backups, just not frequently enough).
                   \_ Those _are_ helpful answers.  There are ways and they
                      are incredibly expensive.  The only other reasonable
                      low cost way is to do regular backups.  Now maybe you
                      have learned something and won't attack someone for
                      providing the truth just because you don't like it.
                        --not the person who gave the 1-2-3 answers above
                   \_ 1) Yes
                      2) Probably on the order of $200-$1000 or more
                         if the platters are scratched.
                      3) No harddrive is failure proof, regardless of
                         what drive you get you need to understand that
                         it will fail and thus you should be doing backups
                         (and restoring from them) frequently enough to
                         make sure that a failure won't cause significant
                         data loss.
                         If frequent backups are not an option, then
                         consider getting a second disk and doing a
                         hot backup every night. At least this way you
                         can plug in a new drive instantly.
                         Consider mirrored raid. Get four disks and mirror
                         your content. The probability that all four disks
                         will fail at the same time is pretty small.
        \_ try http://www.drivesavers.com or for a more detailed selection,
  http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Business_to_Business/Computers/Services/Data_Recovery
           --hopefully helpful
        \_ We have not yet arrived at a reliable, consumer-priced hard drive.
           E.g., the IBM 75GXPs that everyone was fond of has people
           complaining about failures (see http://storagereview.com) for certain
           disk sizes.  Maxtor is known for failing disk.  Seagate ...
           well, they had business problems.  Western Digital seems too
           middle-of-the-road.  Our company got a set of 20GB IDE IBM disks
           about a year ago and 1 out of 5 failed after 6 months.  So, the
           answer is:  backups.
           \_ so, what's good consumer software to use for backups to CD?
                - not the original poster, but "scared straight"
                \_ Pretty much any CD-R burning software will be fine for
                   backups, but you'll have to choose files by hand.  CD-R
                   media generally doesn't work well with automated backup
                   programs because it's so small compared to the disks it's
                   backing up.  -tom
        \_ USB 2.0 == good.  Wait until the end of the year and you'll see.
                \_ uh, what does that have to do with hard disk
                   reliability?
                   \_ USB 2.0 is going to be a big flop, at which point
                      most people will switch IEEE1394, allowing them
                      access to cheap IDE hardware raid solutions.