hard drive failure

recently, my hard drive just up and ceased to work.  took with it about 200G of stuff.  i very much like stuff, and very much dislike losing stuff.

is there any way to recover said stuff?  none of it's important enough to warrant spending x hundreds of dollars on professional data recovery.  but it's still 200G of stuff that i would rather recover than have to redownload.

the drive in question is a WD Caviar SE EIDE 250GB.  it doesn't appear to be making any strange noises, no smoke or funny smells.  bios won't recognize it at all.  swapped ide cables, no effect.  swapped motherboards, no effect.  definately the hard drive's fault.

my current strategy of 'turn computer off, turn it back on, and hope it works again' had limited success, but doesn't seem to do anything useful anymore.

do i have any hope, or should i just start downloading stuff again and enjoy my new doorstop?

If it still spins, it's possible that it's just the logic board (the green circuit board on the bottom) that died. Get another WD Caviar 250GB drive (same EXACT model) and try the new logic board.

If it only occasionally spins, get a backup drive ready and hope that it works. When it does, back up stuff like there's no tomorrow. Then RMA the thing if it's still under warranty.