Old unreadable hard drives - looking to recover files

I have two old hard drives - both from my first iMac (Bondi Blue, purchased in early 1999). The first one "died" sometime in 2002 (blinking folder/question mark) so I replaced it with the second one. Eventually the second died the same death (both OS9).
I moved on and have been with my G5 ever since (2005).
I've kept the two drives in storage, hoping that someday data recovery at home would be a typical option. Ha.
Last week, looking to fiddle with the old drives, I bought a slot-loading iMac CRT on craigslist for $25, no keyboard or mouse. It has a working hard drive with OSX installed. The keyboard/mouse from my G5 work fine on it.
So I removed the hard drive and replaced it with each of my hard drives. Of course, same old story: each drive was unreadable (blinking folder/question mark).
I don't have the original install discs (in fact I don't have any install discs).
All I have is a Norton Utilities disc, which the computer will not start up from no matter which hard drive (including the working one) I have attached (I suspect that even though I press 'C', the newer keyboard takes longer to be recognized and is not readable upon startup). I also tried booting from the Norton CD using open firmware with no luck.
Bottom line is:
I have 2 "dead" hard drives (blinking folder/question mark):
- Quantum Fireball EX 3.5 Series
- Maxtor D540X-4K 3.5" Series
and I have a slot-loading iMac (CRT) with no install discs and only my G5 keyboard/mouse to use it with.
I've done a lot of research looking for any possible way of recovering files from these drives, but all information inevitably leads to "see a data recovery specialist'.
I imagine I will get the same advice here, but I absolutely can't afford the upwards of $1,000 it could cost for that service.
Am I out of luck completely? Should I put the drives back into storage until I can afford a recovery specialist?
Thanks.

Last week, looking to fiddle with the old drives, I bought a slot-loading iMac CRT on craigslist for $25, no keyboard or mouse. It has a working hard drive with OSX installed. The keyboard/mouse from my G5 work fine on it.
So I removed the hard drive and replaced it with each of my hard drives. Of course, same old story: each drive was unreadable (blinking folder/question mark).
I doubt this would boot. You do not have the drivers on your version of Mac OS to support newer hardware.
All I have is a Norton Utilities disc, which the computer will not start up from no matter which hard drive (including the working one) I have attached (I suspect that even though I press 'C', the newer keyboard takes longer to be recognized and is not readable upon startup). I also tried booting from the Norton CD using open firmware with no luck.
Lots of bad reports about Norton. They stopped updating the utility, so user beware.
"Stellar Phoenix Macintosh - Mac data recovery software, recovers data from damaged, deleted, or corrupted volumes and even from initialized disks."
They have a trial version, so I guess you can see if your data can be recovered...
http://www.stellarinfo.com/mac-data-recovery.htm
"Data Rescue II is the best data recovery software on the market for recovering files from a problem hard drive. Data Rescue II works when other tools fail. Data Rescue II is also completely safe to use since it does not attempt any risky repairs to the drive while its scanning."
http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php
FileSalvage is an extremely powerful Macintosh application for exploring and recovering deleted files from a drive or volume. FileSalvage is designed to restore files that have:
* been accidentally deleted.
* become unreadable due to media faults.
* been stored on a drive before it was re-initialized/formatted.
http://subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/index.php?mainpage=product_info&productsid=1

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