my main HD just died

I've been using a USB 300 GB drive to hold all my files over the past year, including all of my bemaniso files, vectors, retagged mp3s, personal pictures, text documents, and shit tons of other data that I had renamed, reorganized and personalized. Basically this data is gone, though not entirely. I haven't formatted it; the problem (according to a tech friend of mine) is that one of the disks has started to spin off of where it's supposed to, and is touching the arm, or something along those lines. He told me that sending it into a shop to get it repaired would cost me ~$1,300, which is way beyond what I can get any time soon. He told me my only option is using "diskrite" which he gave me on a cd, said that I'd lose a large fraction of my data but would keep at least some random files. Though it's an all or none option, if it messes up the process, it'll basically kill the hard drive completely.

I've just come to see if I have any other options that you know of, and if diskrite is worth using.

I talked to him (my tech friend) just now to make sure I said the right thing, he said the "heads are skipping", not the disk or whatever I said before.