Story of a hard-disk crash and recovering data from it..

A few days back the ThinkPad I work on started behaving wierdly and the wierdness increased monotonically and then gave way to predictability..i.e. the TP refused to boot after a certain point in time. Tech support analysis confirmed that it was a disk crash...it did make wierd noises...The repair centre then gave me back the disk to salvage data whichever way I could..(no integrated "repair TP and get data salvaged too" solution was offered unfortunately).
So I put the hard disk in an USB enclosure and looked at what I could get...Initially the signs were very discouraging and I was not able to see any partition even though a USB device was being detected..After much thought, Neeraj Sharma (of key mapping fame :)) came to the rescue and pointed out that the disk was password protected (IBM security policy :) ) and this could be a reason it was not readable on USB. So he and another colleague, Ramanathan, put it back in a Thinkpad with easily removable disks and diabled the password after which I plugged it back into USB. After a rather long wait I saw that the boot partition was completely invisible but the other two were. Most of my data was fortunately on those and I managed to copy it just like that and some after running a disk scan. A further disk scan later the boot partition too was repaired and was up for scavenging. Managed to get some data out of it but a rather big (350MB+) mail archive file was not recovered since the copy would terminate after about 120 MB due to unknown reasons. Anyways, thanks the help from Neeraj Sharma and Ramanathan and the USB enclosure a lot of data was recovered and time and money which otherwise would have been spent on some third party vendor were saved.