there goes my last hope to get my data back

I managed to get a decent screwdriver, and got the disk out of its metal frame and connected to another computer, but the desktop doesn't even recognize the thing as a hard disk. I mean, not just that it can't read the file system, but it doesn't recognize what manner of thing hangs onto its USB port. So short of CSI-level data recovery technomagic, which I can't afford, I won't get anything on that disk back. Waaaahh.