I realize that most of the time data recovery won't require these measures. But the 1 time out of 100 that they do apply people need to be aware that they exist. If your hard drive is dead for physical reasons. Here are a couple of options I have successfully used.
If the hard drive is dead because of the controller board on the disk died. You can obtain another disk with the same model number(from eBay) and put that board on the disk you want to recover your information from. As along as the read heads and platters are good/usable the drive will be recoverable. In fact if the read heads were parked when the board died (such as machine off and water damage) you won't need a recovery program you can just back it up. If the heads weren't parked you will need to hook the drive up externally to another machine and use a data recovery program.
If the hard drive is dead because the bearings are gone on it. Dead bearings usually is noted by a ticking noise. People often assume that the read heads are damaged causing the failure, sometimes that is true. Other times it is the read heads are not in their proper path due to the slop in the bearings. But unless you try this or similar you will never know. You can hook it up to another machine as an external hard drive and put dry ice on the top of the dead hard drive many times this can buy you enough running time to copy your files over to another hard drive. Depending on how much data needs recovered it may take a number of attempts since moving data off the hard drive makes it spin faster, than it does at idle, creating heat and giving the bearing play.