Opening up hard drive???

[944turboHB]

OK my hard drive is bad, I guess, one day it was working fine but really slow, I tried running AIM and it said a file was missing or corrupt, it sais to reinstall the program, so i restart the computer and this time windows xp won't even start beause a file is also missing or corrupt (isapnp.sys) It tells me i can try repairing it through the repair console using the windows XP cd. i run the reepair cosole and i try to see inside my drive and it says "error occurred during drive enumeration" I can't see anything in my drive but BIOS sees it. I then tried the Powermax program since it is supposedly THE program that you should use for a maxtor and it couldn't read it, it says this drive is failing, I also tried running it on another system as a slave, I can see it but I can't get into it. Will the freezer trick work for this? Or should I just buy another one just like mine and carefully CAREFULLY, in a dust free room with gloves and being very careful remove the disks with the data on them and put them in the new hard drive? Please help me I lost all my data I have had since I ever owned a computer. Thanks.
~Mark

[noprob]

I sure hope someone can help/assist you.
Only way I might be of help/service would be to have said hard drive in my possession to have a look see,
with no guarantee,but I would do my best to save data if possible.
Then burn it to cd.
Good Luck.

P.S.is the partition FAT32 or NT file system?

*edit*

also you mentioned the maxtor hard drive software.hopely you didn't use/install the overlay which allows an outdated bios/cmos to access a bigger hard drive then intended to by said bios.I believe it is called DOD,been awhile.

[noprob]

*Deleted*

[944turboHB]

It's a NTFS file system, I only used powermax which is maxtor's utility for verifying drives, but it didnt help, and it was just a floppy disk that you boot off of with the hard drive inside the computer. What exactly would you do to try and recover the data? You can just e-mail me at mac1@alfred.edu, thanks for the reply and the help.
~Mark