As a matter of fact, it IS an IBM Deathstar!

First, drives are not totally sealed, there will be a tiny hole with a very fine air filter, however opening up a drive will kill it as dust in the air will be electrostatically attracted to the platters and they will get a slight coating and eventually when you see the color change they will not be readable.
If you need to recover data, you need a drive that is the exact same model and revision, look at the pcb on it usually you will see revisions and firmware versions, you need everything the same.
First just get the drive good and cold and see if it will read the data, an external usb enclosure is good here as you can have your os up and running and plug in the cooled off drive and start copying data off before it heats up and fails again.
second try wapping the pcb on the bottom.
Lastly then you open them, watch for hidden screws under the stickers and carefully swap the contents of both. Modern drives have very few platters and the heads don't park off the platter so you have to remove the platters and head arm at the same time. If not done in a clean room the life of both drives will be reduced to hours. Be sure to wear rubber gloves to prevent oils from your fingers from messing up the platters. The alignment of the tracks is all done electronicaly in a voice coil drive, it moved the head until it finds the track so alignment isn't critical. I've recovered data a couple times this way, destroys both drives and if the failed one was under warranty then you have voided that warranty.

lol I am so surprised......wait no im not.

The suprising thing is that I have an 12.7 (or so) Gig Deathstar in my little Vaio, and it's running strong. Of course, it doesn't get used much anymore...

There was a short time when IBM screwed up a nice line of drives (they were the fastest drives one could get at the time) and they had like a 12% failure rate. They seemed to have fixed that and IBM blames Toshiba......but I doubt they will ever live the Deathstar name down.

back on topic: If your data is that important to you then you should take it to a recovery center and let the pro's do it. if however you have money to burn on the drive and everythign is exactly the same as your old one and you won't mind having two bad drives then go for it. However I maintain its a stupid idea but thats because I don't like to waste computer parts.

Data recovery services charge thousands of dollars compared to a couple hundred or less for the price of a drive. If your skilled with hardware and need your data but don't have several thousand lying around to pay the "pros" then its a good plan to try to recover it your self.

if your data is so important to you that YOU must recover it then I would spend the money just to insure I actually did get my data back. With the heads only microns above the sruface a dust particle going around on a platter at 7200 RPM's is like a cannon shot.

Like I said , if you don't have thousands of dollars to spend. My data is important to me but I could not justify spending that much $ for recovery. Your head isn't going to bounce off the platter like a cannon shot, worst case it will scratch the platter and damage it but your data is already gone. Its like CPR the person is already dead so you can't kill them any more so you might as well try.

Ah but you can get sued then :-p

Not if they are still dead, dead people can't sue

But their family can. However, most states have good samaritan laws to protect untrained do-gooders.

I always thought most laws dicated that you cannot sue a certfied CPR person, however one who is not trained can be sued. Either way if you aren't trained in CPR you most certainly shouldn't attempt it as you could end up doin gmore harm then good.

Naw, they want to encourage people to help, whether they're trained or not; if you're not trained, call 911 and give it a go anyway, as the worst thing that can happen is that they die with a couple of broken ribs, or a separated xyphoid process. It usually takes 5 minutes or so for the EMTs to arrive, and 5 mins of half-arsed CPR can make the difference between a full recovery and cerebral cabbage. EMS personnell, OTOH, have much more to worry about.

Edit:
If you MUST have the data, pay the pros to do it! This is not like changing your car's oil filter, or some household DIY project, hard drives require a precision unattainable outside a clean room environment.

i think enine suggestion is perfectly possible , i can still remember quite some time ago , i tried opening an old apple drive(but from quantum or micropolis i can't remember) , 500mb or 1 gb , cause the read/write head kind of stick on the disk platter , tried to tab and squeeze-warp the hd but can't get the head to stick-off the platter , so i open up the cover and do it manually , after doing that , i just power up the pc without screwing back the cover just wanted to know how the read-write head search for sectors(clusters?i donno) "physically" , although i install freedos on that hd , but its a "messy" type of dos installation , i think i had it run in this condition(without the cover) for a few times , sometimes for a few hours , without any heavy crash , just some bad sectors found initially , i'm still using that pc , i have to say that if you use your hand to hold on to the hd while it spins , you can feel that the hd is floating by itself , if that hd is a modern one , like say 7200rpm , it may be more fun ... so yeah , although i never try to recover data in this manner , but i believe its possible to do that by dismantling the plates and moving them to another working hd , i guess you may need some special tools , not only philips or flat head , and many hd are really really creative in hiding their tiny srews all over the place(thats actually is the fun part) , make sure you got a firm hand , if found some "big" hair-line dusts or chewing gum(my goodness!!) , try your best not to remove them with your fingers(if you dont have a very firm one) , that will only cause more trouble , just lightly blow(i mean the dry type) or tapping the side with the hd turned upside-down or something like that _

one more thing , dont use that hd for production purposes anymore ...

Again, cost. Not all of us can afford to pay the thousands of dollars for it, also it does not require any kind of precision, just take out some screws and swap parts and put the screws back in. Yes without a cleanroom you will destroy both drives in the process but that still a much lower cost than paying someone else to do it.
Also the "pros"don't even guarentee that they can retrieve the data, you will sign a big leal disclaimer when you do pay them.
Are you made of money, do you have a personal maid and a professional chef? Can you afford a loan the amount of a used car to get data from a hard drive?