Hard disk recovery

When you are retrieving the data (from the frozen disk), don't try to boot from it - get a USB enclosure and attach it to another machine. Get the important data off as fast as you can - this trick doesn't work for very long (if at all). Sometimes you can refreeze it for a little more time.

All data recovery services are expensive (hundreds of dollars), so it will depend on how valuable that data is (and how much of it there is). There's a shop in Houston that I've used successfully, and while it wasn't cheap, the cap on how much they will charge you was lower than most places (it ended up costing about $800). http://www.abcdatarecovered.com/ YMMV.