Hard Drived Burned Up

Oy.

My hard drive that stored my subversion repository burned up.  No, really.  It burned up.  I saw smoke coming from one of the ICs on the PCB.

The drive is still under warranty, but I don’t care about the drive.  Hard drives are cheap.  This contained three large personal projects, a boatload of mp3s, tax documents from the last 3 years, and unfortunately something non-replaceable:  A recording of my mom singing a lullaby that she wrote.

I spoke to some data recovery people, and I got prices ranging from $1000 – $2500, and they are pretty confident in getting the data back.  The problem is that I am trying to save money for my wedding, and shelling out a grand for data recovery is out of the question at this time.

My other option is to buy an identical drive and just replace the PCB.  It looks easy enough, but I need to make sure that the PCB is the exact same one.  From what it looks like, there’s only 4 solder points, going directly into the drive controlling the heads. 

What should I do?  Should I attempt this ghetto-recovery?  Should I pay the $1k?