No excuses, no backup, but would like to recover HD data

For every website that says freezing a drive won't work or opening a drive is fatal - there are plenty of sites showing individuals who have successfully done both, myself included. With that said, by opening the cover I admit the odds have been tipped against you.

At this point it depends on how bad you want the data: Get a quote from a recovery company? Put the cover on, power it back up and use any number of open source software to try and read the data?