All pictures lost : ( / please help!

My 2-month old Western Digital WD2500 Serial ATA
hard drive stopped working and I lost all my digital family
pictures (from the last seven years).

WD people will replace the HD under warranty, but only if I don’t
open it or if I choose one of their service partners
for a data recovery service. I just found but they charge
no less than $1000 just to recover the 30 gig folder where my
pictures were stored, so it is a no win situation for me.

I’m running Windows XP Professional in a Pentium-4 PC, and
the damaged driver was working as a NTFS file system “slave”.

Last Saturday I was adding some more pictures to it, and
suddenly without making any noise nor previous problem
at all, the driver froze and stopped working. After several attempts
restarting windows, trying different computers, etc. Windows “saw”
the driver for one last time. I saw my precious pictures folder there,
but I couldn’t retrieve a single file, as after a couple of
minutes the driver stopped working for good.
All attempts that followed were not successful.

My dilemma is that if I open the drive with the hope that
I can free the disk to make it rotate once again just to retrieve
the picture folder, then Western Digital will void
the warranty. This won’t matter if I succeed
recovering my pictures, but if not?

My questions a

Do I have a chance to make the drive spin, at least
for a while if I remove the cover?

Does anyone know if there is a less expensive service
to retrieve my data, even if doing so I loose the
WD warranty?

I have found some software designed to retrieve lost data
from damaged drives, like HDD Regenerator, but I can’t
try anything because my PC does not even boot when the drive
is connected.

I’ll appreciate any help regarding this matter.

Thanks in advance.
Paul