gdgt

If the drive is removable you can try adding to a desktop as a secondary drive and recovering from there. This is mentioned on the official support site I have linked to below.

wdc.custhelp.com­/app­/answers­/detail­/search­/1­/a­_id­/...

If it is a crashed drive and completely unreadable by a PC, the data recovery is your only option.

I can say that I have very good as well bad experience with data recovery software. One day my hard drive had crashed. All data was become inaccessible even I was not able to boot the system. I tried lots of data recovery software which also give CD for booting the system but when I tried to boot my system from given CD, The system was not boot. I purchased 2 different software to recover lost data but both were failed. In last One of my friend suggest me to try Stellar Phoenix. But I was too much worried because I had already waste my money on two fake software. In last, I took another risk because the data was worth for me & purchased Stellar Windows Data Recovery software- pro edition & you know the result is unbelievable. First I insert the boot cd which was given in software pack & my system started booting & than I installed software & recover all my data. I am trying this software from last 1.5 years because the software has life time license & can be use on one system as many times as you want. If your hard drive is not severely damage than First you try data recovery software which is much cheaper than professional data recovery services. Stellar also provides data recovery services but I have no idea about it. You can check it from its official site.