A lot of the time even when you can recover files from a crashed HD the files are corrupted in some way or tend to be damaged, at least in my experience with this sort of thing.
spent a few hours on the harddrive. reformatted and its still good. i have all of my sounds and most of my samples on dvd's. you best believe i looked all day for that shit. i not going to use this harddrive anymore went with a 60 gig i had in my vista machine. the 500gb is about to get a little more cramped
When I worked in tech I probably froze 50 drives and got data off about 30 of them. What actually happens is that what often fails on a hard drive is the controller chip. Those chips tend to last a little long when very cold (as do about every other compute part) heat is the enemy. It may sound like a strange solution but it is one that I have had very good luck with it. Also once you format the drive your not getting your data back BTW.
And when I leave my house, I put my MPC in the washing machine and I hide my hard drives under the mattress or behind the toilet paper in the bathroom.