Can I extract data off of a hard drive for free???

Most of the cheap/free utilities are only capable of retrieving data that's been accidentally deleted but not yet overwritten. Data loss caused by physical damage (which is what seems to have happened to your drive) is only retrievable by the expensive route -- the specialists. You'll have to decide how valuable it is to you and is it worth the cost of getting it back.

That's why any important data you have be sure to back it up to blank DVD's
-Andrew

Uh, not really...

If it is data you really want to get back, I would suggest Spinrite 6, from www.grc.com. It is $89, which is not free, but it might be a little cheaper than Virtual Lab... It works better than any other program out there, too...

The other nice thing about Spinrite 6 is it will work on just about anything. It will recover Windows, Mac, Linux, Unix, etc... It will recover a bad Tivo drive (Which is a Linux operating system) if you take it out of the Tivo unit and stick it in a PC...

Drives these days can start to go south without much notice... A lot of people think that they are safe because they have turned on S.M.A.R.T (Self Monitoring Analysis and Recovery Technology) but I have never seen a SMART drive actually warn you before it took a dump.

All disk drives these days have thousands or even hundreds of thousands of defects... You never see this because the ECC algorithym's keep stuff working in the background... If the drive has a bad spot, it reallocates the data to a new spot... This is happening constantly, and you have no idea it's going on... The problem arises when head degradation starts getting bad, and all your data on the drive is suddenly not easily readable...

If the data isn't worth $89, then it's really not all that important... But if it is, then this is the best that money can buy.

Spinrite will actually fix the drive so that it will be working again... When it's up, you need to clone that drive to a new drive immediately... Head degradation doesn't ever get better, it only gets worse as time goes on.

shenr,
For the most part I do have to agree with Keldawwg, but there is one other program that may be of help. File Rescue plus will recovery any files not overwritten by file movement or installations. It is low cost and has a trial that you can test to see if it can locate the files you need. The cost is $29.95. What ever program you use, make sure you put the drive in another working system to be recoverd from/to. This will help prevent the system from writing files ( its own or others ) to your failing drive and risking more loss of needed files.
Good luck!