I had one Hitachi drive a while back where the electronic controller board appeared to have died on it. I was fortunate enough to have an identical drive and I was able to swap the PC board off the one good drive onto the failed one and recover about 95% of my data.
I had one other drive failure that I had a friend mount in a Linux environment and he was able to recover the lions share of the data from the drive. The drive wouldn't mount in a Windows environment.
A while back I bought one of the hard drive drive adapters that plugs into a USB port. It is one of the handiest tools I have ever bought, it seems to work pretty seamlessly no matter what the computer is. It is especially handy for laptops since then you don't usually have the luxury of the additional parallel/SATA port.