Quantum Lightning 540 AT Hard Disk

I have an old Quantum Lightning 540 AT hard disk containing some data I want to retrieve. The drive itself was removed from a computer some years ago (about 7 or 8 years), working as far as I remember. However, now, having tried to install the drive in a more modern machine to archive the data to CDR, the drive while recognized by the machine and the drive itself spinning up and apparently working returns a "hard disk read failure" error. Trawling the web, I found a short thread entitled "HD repair techniques" on cctalk. Like the original author of this thread, I too have a drive that contains data that is perhaps not worth the hundreds of pounds (GBP) that professional data recovery entails but wouldn't mind recovering the data all the same. Can anybody point me in the direction of any good information regarding the testing/diagnosis/repair of head-disk-assembly problems? Roger