Help wanted on a Maxtor 92048D8 20Gb drive

I am not knowledgeable with respect to hardware and electronics,

I have a Maxtor 92048D8 20Gb drive, which has failed recently. I will
most probably throw it away, but before that, I'd like to get back some
of the files that were stored on it Any help will be appreciated.

The drive is recognized only once in a while (1 out of 5 ?) by the BIOS
at boot time; even when it is recognized, Win2000 (on another drive)
tends to freeze after a few minutes, without any chance for me to look
at the drive (anyway, I know that the FAT 32 is messed up - see below)

Using a W98-DOS diskette, and power-cycle the PC until the drive is
recognized, I can look ("dir" and "cd" commands) at some folders, but
any othert serious read I've tried ("xcopy") has failed, either by
freezing the system, or by giving me a long list of file not found
errors (or similar).


Disk tools running from W2K or W98-window are of no help, of course ; I
tried HDM and another similar tool. HDM tells me that the "Fat
Allocation Table test" fails, tries to fix it, says it has, but the disk
remains in the same bad logical state - of course, I would not expect
such tools fixes the hardware part.

I know that I could ask a specialized company to work on my disk, but I
fear it will be quite expensive...

So... my question is: from the symptoms, has any of you, O wise gurus,
an idea of whether and how I could fix the hardware/electronic long
enough for me to get the files ? Or should I just throw away everything,
forget about my work files, my hundred of emails, etc.

Do you have a suggestion ?

Thanks,

Gilbert