Dell-BSOD-Hard drive crash-not recognized by bios or computer

[jacks05]

Two days ago while I was at work, there was a power surge in the area that was apparently pretty bad (so I'm told). When I got home I walked in to find my computer booting up and was on windows load screen for a long time. I am not sure if it was the first attempt to load or if it had kept rebooting as I was not here, but I waited for about an hour and when it had done nothing but froze I had hard shut down the computer. When bringing it back up it came up with the BSOD error 0000007b and would not go any further. At that point I shut down again and went into BIOS. The computer was not recognizing the hard drive. I waited until the next day and purchased a new hard drive, removed the old and put in the new. I was hoping to be able to put the "crashed" hard drive in as a second and pull all files off of it. However, though still spinning with no noises coming from it I have failed to do so. I took the "crashed" hard drive and put it in another computer in the home and it does not read it either. I would REALLY NOT like to pay very large sums of money to get back to my important documents. Is there a way to get to the information and transfer without the hard drive being read, "taking platters apart", putting things in freezers, or paying large sums of money? I saw that spinrite was a good one to detect the undetectable is this true?

Technical information needed to know. I am working on a Dell with Vista Home premium, AMD athlon 64 X2 dual core processor 4400 + 2.30 GHz, 3006 MB RAM, 32-bit operating system. The "crashed" hard drive is a SATA Samsung Model HD321KJ 320 GB 7200 RPM and the new hard drive is a SATA Seagate Barracuda 500 GB 7200 RPM.