Recover data off of damaged HDD?

Surely you have another sata connection on your motherboard to connect it to.
The other way is to buy an external usb sata case and put your drive in it to access the data.
http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategor...

no, the end that is damaged is the on the hard drive, not on the mobo, I should have made that clearer, sorry

If your hard drive is damaged, then it's hard to say. Take the hard drive out from the computer and put it on another computer and see if it can be detected. If it can be recognized, then you may try some data recovery program to see if some data can be recovered. This article talks about the 10 FREE File Recovery tools. Worth for your try.
http://filerecoveryhelp.wordpress.com/2010/09/28/top-10...

Still without luck? The only way is to take your hard drive for data recovery services.

The other thing you can do is find an exact model of the same drive and swap out the controller board, save the data, and move the controller board back to the new drive.

And you have a replacement drive.

When replacing the PCB, you need to transplant the 8-pin serial EEPROM chip from patient to donor. This chip stores unique drive specific calibration information.

These URLs should help you identify the components:

http://hddscan.com/doc/HDD_from_inside.html
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/HDD_ICs.txt
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/TVS_diodes.txt

The following supplier charges US$40 for a PCB, plus $10 for a ROM transfer:
http://www.onepcbsolution.com/

BTW, I am not associated with any vendor.

I broke the SATA connector on one of my Seagate 320 Gig drives. The plastic part was still in the SATA cable. I hot glued the cable onto the drive. As long as the drive or cable is not moved it works fine.

If the pins are good and you have the plastic piece in the cable they should make contact. You can get the data off the drive. IF you have to you can cut one end of a SATA cable and as long as you solder the correct wire to the correct pin you can do that if you have to.

Pins 1, 4 and 7 are grounds, Most of the time they are just bare wires in the cable. Pins 2,3 (TRANSMIT) and 5,6 (RECEIVE) are the data wires, Just make sure you do not cross the wires. The data cables have plastic over them and they are inside shields. I have cut and soldered the wires to a SATA drive to recover the data for a friend before.

The pin outs are available on the net and with a multi meter you can ensure you have the correct wires, I put electrical tape between each pin as I soldered them so no contact occurred between the wires. It takes a fine solder gun and very little solder and a steady hand.