So I was called in to help with my uncle's computer woes.
It appears his IBM 40GB Deskstar is dead.

Trying to boot from it, his intel desktop board reports an error
related to reading the SMART info from the drive. S.M.A.R.T. data
unavailable - or something to that extent..
hit f4 to continue (if you hit f4, bios then says it can't boot from
the drive.)

I booted from a CD Image of the latest hitachi drive fitness test.
Running a quick test found bad sectors. I ran sector repair rather
than wiping the drive, since I want to recover data somehow. After
attempting to repair the bad sector(s), I'm presented with a nice big
RED screen to let me know things are NOT good.

0x70 - defective media
and a technical result code (TRC)

I tried dropping the drive into an external USB case. My goal being to
copy data off the drive to another computer. The system detected the
drive and model properly, but rather than give me access to the data,
I'm hearing what I presume is a repetetive attempt at accessing some
damaged area of the drive.

spin spin spin spin
pause
spin spin spin spin
pause

and so on... and so on...

I didn't figure it would help any, but I opened up the other pc, and
dropped this drive in as a secondary slave. Windows showed the drive
in my computer as a local disk, but when trying to open the drive...

spin spin spin spin
pause
spin spin spin spin
pause

then a popup... the disk in drive G is not formatted.. would you like
to format it now?

I chose no for the time being.

Is there anything I can do to recover data from this drive? Some
utility? some trick to get it to move passed this damaged area and
rover data from the rest of the drive? Or is it beyond the abilities
of a home *power* user like myself? I'll check with my uncle, but I
doubt there is any data on there that was so important, that it would
warrent sending the drive to a data recovery specialist. (though I
have no clue that sorta thing would cost in any case.. maybe it would
be worth it?).

Thanks in advance for any help / advice / info you can provide.
-Ethan