Getting data out of a non-working SATA drive

Can anything be done to get data out of a dead SATA drive, the drive won't even show up on the list of drives when booting the computer?

UPDATE:

The drive was never backed-up. It was an external home-grade MyBook used at an SMB as "storage".

After prying-it open, I tried the freezer trick, and IT WORKS! (you just need to be patient)...

We were able to recover 100% of the data.

How valuable is the data? If your business depends on it, disconnect it and call a professional recovery service.

If it's not so valuable, this is a pretty good summary of steps you can take yourself.

It includes the controller board changing idea Dentrasi mentioned and also everyone's favourite, the freezer trick.

if it's 6-12 months year old maxtor/seagate 500GB-1.5TB drive, chances are you hit their firmware bug. if so - they will recover data for free.

If there drive spins up, then there's a good chance that it's the board on the back that's failed. If you can get an identical drive (ebay is often good), you can try swapping the boards over, which might let you read from then current drive.

If you've got very important data on it, and don't have backups, I'd advise taking it to a professional, trying to do it yourself with no experience will probably just end up destroying any chance of getting your data back.

Get a SATA-USB adapter. That way you can fiddle with it all you want. Boot into a Linux live-cd first, it will probably give you much more info than Windows -- try "dmesg" to see what the kernel has to say.