I have been told to try and recover my failed hard drive will mean it has to
be sent away and will cost upwards of £600 surely this cannot be correct.
Help would be greatly appreciated

to get the data off the hard drive is very expensive.

can you get another hard drive for your laptop, have you the install discs that came with the machine?

do you know any one who could put your hard drive in as a slave and try and recover the data.

I'm not clear if you're trying to recover the info on your hard drive or just trying to get it up and running again. If you want to just get it running again (assuming that it's not physically damaged), find out who made it, get online and download their zero-write program for your particlar hard drive (usually free). Put it in your PC and follow the instructions for a complete zero-write. If that works, you'll have to reload everything-OS and all else. As the other poster said, if you're trying to recover info, it could be very expensive-depends how valuable that info really is to you. However, the price you have been given sounds like a commercial application-find a geek who can do it cheaperfor info recovery.