Hard Drive failure

I currently have a faulty 80.00 gigabyte HD for my Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop. Here is some information I found on the label:

I was running my computer overnight when what looked like a BIOS error read "Optical Disk not found. Hard Drive not found." I turned off the computer. The next day, I booted it up and I heard some funny, but faint noises from the HD. The computer didn't give me any errors but if I ran the computer for more than about 45 minutes the computer would just freeze up, without giving me an error message.  I tried repairing the windows xp software (from booting from the Windows XP installation CD), but that didn't seem to have any effect. Next, I used the chkdsk /r command in the command line program on Windows, which took about three hours before I got this message:

STOP: c000021a
Unknown Hard Error

I also was hearing some loud whirring (if not grinding) noises and the BIOS wasn't registering the hard drive.

I was wondering: Can my hard drive be repaired, and if so, can the data on the disk be salvaged?

I have some pirated software on my now defective HD, so would it be safe to take it to some of the data recovery specialists I looked up on google?

>>1
SPAWN MORE OVERLORDS

What do you think? If you give you PC to PCWorld or some other company to save it, of course they're going to look through all your stuff; porn, family photos, music to steal, warez etc. After all, idiot Gary Glitter was done by PCWorld after he gave them his PC to fix and they found loads of CP on his PC. Lesson: don't bother, unless you have a pretty good idea who you're dealing with and how easily they can check to see if it's pirated or not.

Otherwise, you have the following option: replace the hard drive, reformat & reinstall. Then put faulty disk in an external caddy and check to see if you resurrect it. Google hard drive repair utilities.