It appears pretty much a lost cause at this stage? What some have apparently not read is that the defective hard drive was opened, exposing the platters. A fatal mistake if not done in a class m100 clean room when attempting to recover data.
You may get the drive to be recognized, but that doesn't mean you will be able to extract data? Especially, the specific files you want?
About the only possibility even a pro data recovery company can do to save files, is if the HD was "not" powered up after opening the drive. Which may prevent scratching the platters due to contamination. However, if scratched, the data in effected sectors is permanently lost.
Another issue when installing the cover back on the hard drive is that the screws need to be "torqued" to factory settings. If not, it could cause the read/write head to crash on the platters, again destroying data.
What I don't understand is though there are a number of free and paid utilities to aid recovering data from defective hard drives, none of them include instructions to physically open the hard drive? Unfortunately, a little research before attempting this would have gone a long way?
