A technician came to my house yesterday to check out my hard drive. In very general terms, there are two possible causes of this kind of failure: something in the hard drive fails, or something in the computer that interacts with the hard drive fails. Unfortunately, it looks like the former. He said there isn’t anything you can do if the drive is bad, but I did some Googling and found a number of companies that can recover data from bad drives. Iomega is probably the most well known among them. The downside is – with “prices starting at $300” – it’s probably going to cost a pretty penny.