Hard drive problems

Hey, Ok so I'm getting really desperate here. Ever since a couple weeks or so ago, my second hard drive (Quantum Bigfoot ~9gb) has been acting up. First my computer couldn't read it. it showed up and everything (as drive F:\) but it wouldn't let me access it. the computer in general was also extremely slow. Then it got to the point that the BIOS wouldn't recognize it at all (doing auto HDD detection or whatever). So then I moved it to a different computer and that one recognized it and tried to run scandisk on it. so I went ahead and let it do that (I let it go overnight) and the next morning the computer was frozen so I turned it off. then when I turned it back on it wouldn't recognize the hard drive again. Any help on what I should do would be greatly appreciated. it's been really bothering me, I had 1300+ songs on it (took forever to get) plus some other important stuff. I know it was probably a bad idea to run scandisk on it but that wouldn't make it stop working again would it? again, any help would be great. I'm really desperate, I can't really think about anything else right now. also I've googled it and looked up data recovery places and stuff but is there anything I can do short of spending hundreds of dollars on recovery places? I don't exactly feel comfortable with having all my…data in the hands of random people either. ;) thanks!

ps. yes I've learned my lesson. 1) backup important stuff; 2) don't use old crappy hdd's…