Read Failure on Hard Drive

I have a Dell Studio 1536. When I boot it up, after the "DELL" power screen... I get a message that says "Internal hard disk drive not found, to resolve this issue, try to reseat the drive."

I have attempted to reseat the drive...no luck.
I can hear the hard drive whirring... but no info is coming out.
In addition, just to try and recover the info on the drive, I took it out and plugged it into my desktop *using a Antec Veris MX-25" docking station... no luck, the desktop recognized the docking station, recognized that a device was in the docking station, but it never pulled the disk up in "My computer" to access.

Finally, I've read a thread on here that said to go into the laptop BIOS and change the SATA Operation from "AHCI" to "IDE" or to disable the SATA Operation. The only options I have on my laptop are "ATA" or "AHCI" or "OFF". I've tried all three.. and the hard drive is only detected in "ATA" but the system won't boot...

HELP PLEASE... I have some info on the hard drive that I have to get to, and I don't know if it's the drive or the laptop or what!

Anyone... please.