Fried WD1000BB??

I have a Western Digital WD1000BB 00CAA1 100GB drive that my BIOS sees as
WD1200BB and 8.4GB. Warranty is long gone, but the DATA is VERY important to my 17yo son David. He has personal photos and digital artwork on the drive that are priceless to him. Here is the story behind this:

My 13yo son Daniel, told me his CD-Rom was not working so I thought
I would ask David if we could try his CD-Rom in Daniel's computer. David said he was just starting to play a game... Like the idiot I am, I thought I could pull the CD-Rom on the fly (power was on).

Well, I saw a spark when I tried to disconnect the power cable and the computer immediately shut down. Game over David! Now when I rebooted, I get a disk error. Not sure why the sprk would fry the HD as it was on the primary IDE and the spark was caused from the secondary IDE cable.

I ended up getting David a new HD and he is back up and running, but I feel horrible that he will loose all photos of him and his friends over the last few years as well as his artwork and high school projects. Not to mention about 300 of his favorite MP3 files.

I have a feeling the PCB board on the hard drive was shorted but am not entirely certain that that is the problem. The Bios still sees the drive as stated above but WindowsXP Pro, Ubuntu and BartPE do not see it at all. I D/L WD Diagnostic tools which boot to DR-DOS and it shows up there but it shows HEX? characters? and only sees 8.4gb.

Have read lots of discussions on dead HD issues but still uncertain if data on this disk is salvagable or not. Read about freezing the drive, dropping it several times, swapping the PCB board (sounds like the most promising option). I'm not sure if the drive is spinning or not, if it is, it's spinning real slow. When power is supplied, my HD light does come on and I can feel VERY light vibrations when I put my hand on the drive. Does anyone have ideas? TIA.

 

It seems like all your options lead up to losing the data, even if you are able to salvage the drive somehow. If you were able to get it to a data recovery, you should have a good chance at getting some stuff back. Because rather than the data being erased that quick, I'm betting something leading up to that within th HD was fried, leaving the data secured, but the road to it messed up. It would take somebody skilled to get it out though.