So here's where we stand with the computer. We took it to the Geek Squad at Best Buy and they gave us no hope. $200 gone on that. Then several people recommended Intrex, so I toted the computer there yesterday. $100. They couldn't read the drive either. However, they said they had seen this before and they knew exactly who to send it to and are confident the data can be retrieved. (I liked Intrex very much and will be using them for future repairs, if needed.)

Intrex can remove the hard drive, which we would then mail to this third party vendor. Intrex said it would probably be a week or two before we got the data back. I don't have a price quote at this point.