HELP!! Owner of an Asus S96J - hitachi HD not detected by bios

Hey everyone. I am in dire need of assistance. I bought an Asus S96J about 2 months ago. I purchased the barebones and assembled it myself. Yesterday, I was using my laptop unplugged and it froze in windows (i'm running Xp Pro). I was about to reset it when a blue screen flashed and then the computer rebooted. On the reboot, my computer didnt boot up; i went into bios to see if the HD was detected and to my dismay, it wasnt. I am running a hitachi travelstar 80 gb 7200 rpm SATA drive. I tried plugging the drive into a desktop but it isnt detected. However, it does spin properly and no odd sounds come from the disk. My main issue is recovering my data. I've been doing research on it for Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston for the past 2 months. I called hitachi and they said i would have to send it into a professional hard drive recovery company. Unfortunatley, the cost would be around 500 dollars or more. I find this outrageous and being somewhat computer knowledgeable, i will try to recover the data myself. If anyone on this forum knows a way to recover my data, i BEG you please help me! This data is crucial and many hours of hard work will be lost if i can't recover it. Thank you for everybody's help.

- KlutZ

 

I've had this happen before also...data recovery is an art and sending it to the pro's is the best way to go...though it is expensive it can often be well worth it.