Dell laptop hard drive crash?

Hey all
I think that I may have had a full hard drive crash and burn, but I wanted to check and see if there was any hope in recovering anything. My laptop is a Dell Inspirion 8600 that's one and a half years old. The other day when I was playing a game, my hard drive started making strange clicking sounds and locked up. A few seconds later, the entire computer crashed and gave me a "Blue Screen of Death" with something about a Kernel error. I didn't pay too much attention to it and I restarted my computer, hoping that nothing was wrong. Unfortunately, this was not true. Now my computer does not recognize that I even have a hard drive and gives me boot errors when I try to boot it up. It gives me the message that there are no bootable devices.
I've talked to a few people and they've said that it was a hard drive crash and that the hard drive is busted.
I've tried re-seating the hard drive in the bay several times, and it still gives me the same error. Though I may be naive, I still hope that I can somehow recover the files on it without going to a data recovery service place and paying hundreds or thousands of dollars to get it back.

Can anyone tell me if my hard drive is truly dead and if I can recover any of my files without paying an arm/leg? If I do have to go through some data recovery people, what do they usually charge (I think it's some fee per megabyte, but I'm not sure). Also, someone said that I should buy an adapter for the hard drive to fit into a desktop and see if I can read it that way. Do you think this will work in this case?

The laptop is Dell Inspirion 8600 that is a year and a half old. It has a Pentium M 1.4 ghz processor, a 64 mb video card, 512 mb of ram, and a dvd-rw/cd-rw drive on it. The hard drive itself came standard with the laptop; it was a 30 gb hard drive. It was running Windows XP home edition v2.

Any help that you could give me woule be GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks again