Can this be recovered?

[Nazo]

My grandmother's HD has pretty much died. As in physically, nothing nice like a little file system damage that can be backed up or recovered via a good rescue disc. Unfortunately, apparently she hasn't been keeping regular backups (just learned she didn't know how... oops...) However, she needs to pay bills and that sort of thing, but she has no idea what is in her account since she kept it all in Quicken. Anyway, that's all background information. The important thing is, this drive is pretty seroiusly failing. It now causes the BIOS to say the hd failed and require you to hit F1 to continue. I've brought it over to my computer to see if I can get anything out of it, but, so far no good. Anything that tries to use it will just report a host of IDE synce/etc and timeout type errors. So basically, nothing seems to want to touch it. Is there ANY hope at all? And don't say $1K+ recovery service, if she had that much, the bills wouldn't have been a problem. ^_^

I'm sorry, I know you get asked this type of thing on a regular basis, but, most of them just end with stuff like that it's beyond hope or to just use the expensive service. I'm perfectly willing to wait an hour while it runs through a million stupid errors even just to extract minor things like those bank account files though. Problem is, all the tools I've tried so far just won't touch the thing. Many even act like the drive just doesn't even exist, though it definitely shows up enough to cause troubles and things like linux see it, though I still can't seem to access any thing on it there.