When one of my external disks has stuck (the motor has jammed), I've brought it to the service which specializes on the data recovery. They told me it will cost about $1000 for a try to recover the data (this includes transplantation of the magnetic surfaces to another disk in the hermetic chamber etc) but they still can't guaranty the result. Course I've rejected their proposal.
So what I did? I have plugged the cable and smashed the disk two times by a floor (ok, the floor was covered with a carpeting) and... it started spinning again. I was able to transfer all the necessary data which I've said "goodbye" already. And that's NOT a joke
