I happened to stumble upon a blog post a few days ago. Apparently, some guy was having the same problem as me, on his laptop. He put his laptop his refridgerator for about 45 minutes and viola, the hard drive was working again! He was able to transfer the files he needed off onto an external. Once the harddrive warmed up it would lock up again, but it gave him a good amount of time to get what he needed, and he just kept cooling it off again.
I tried it with my broken hard drive today. Put it in the freezer for about a half hour. Took it out, put it back in the external case and plugged it in. I've now recovered over 30GB worth of files which I thought were lost, and it doesn't show any hints of slowing down yet (about 20 minutes out of the freezer and running.)
Figured I would share this with anyone that was having hard drive problems and needed to recover files from it. I have no idea why it works, nor how damaging it is to your hard drive, but if your HD is broken already it's worth a shot.
