The dreaded worst has just happened to me...

My notebook (my primary computer) that I just bought in Sept., now has a HD that won't spin up. It was running fine up until this point. I came home from work today to sit in front of the machine and had a blue screen greet me. It said there was a failure and it was doing a physical memory dump. (If I'm not mistaken, this screen usually pops up for a moment then disappears - but it was just sitting there this time).. When I rebooted, I got a "Operating System Not Found".

The drive will not even spin up now. I tried to power it up in other machines, but it's as if no power is getting to it.

Does anyone know of a data recovery business that doesn't think I have the budget of Boeing? Someone also suggested that I buy an identical drive and swap the board.... eek!

I'm so bumm'd out over this. I just moved all of this data from other machines onto this drive to "secure it" (because the computer is new) until I could back it up. I have a bunch of stuff on there - but the stuff that's upsetting me the most is my wedding photos.... I took 300 over the course of my wedding and honeymoon - all digital. And these companies want to charge me upwards of $1200....

SO STRESSED RIGHT NOW. I thought HD's were supposed to give a warning before they took a dump.