Dead Hard drive? Can I get stuff back?

Alright last month we had a bad power surge which basically fucked me royally. Fried my PC motherboard/vid card/ and printer. They were all on a surge protector which didn't do jack shit. The pc had a 80gig WD IDE hard drive that i'm not sure still works. I would like to get some stuff back from the dead if possible. I tried an external case to see if it worked but i think the case was bad so I returned it and now am waiting for the new one to arrive.

In the mean time I hooked up the hd to my bro's dell pc and it would not recognize the drive. Kept saying primary drive 0 not found. I tried using it as a slave and still nothing. Now I read somewhere online if I use Knoppix (?) or something which is a linux thing I might be able to get the stuff from the drive if I'm lucky. Is that true? If not is there any possible way I can get my stuff back without spending ridiculous amounts of money?

You could try putting it in the freezer for a couple hours and then hooking it up to a comp, but if it's not even being recognized then I'd say you're pretty much fucked.

if your bios isn't recognizing the drive at all, no change of OS will help you.

well fuck 50 gigs of dl'd music all gone

Thanks anywho

poor vorty

pickles! got anyplace i can get music from? :[

not anymore

This is why I have 3 backups of my MP3s