The safest option is to bring the drive into your local computer centre
Um... that greatly varies from shop to shop, because at quite a few of them they won't know a PC from a hole in the ground.
The problem with half-dead drives is that it's also really easy to make the problem worse and completely kill any hopes of a recovery. Before you let them work on a machine, try to make sure that they know what they're doing, instead of just 'being willing to poke it a bit and see what happens'...