Recover an iMovie from a failed external drive?

Has anyone been able to get an entire iMovie recovered from a failed external Firewire drive? My LaCie just won't power up despite having its light come on, and having other external drives connected through it to my iMac and working fine.
I was about to do some backing up after finishing some edits on my latest iMovie, located on that drive. The edits were taking a longer time than usual, with spinning beach ball going on and on, so I decided to restart the Mac and see if that would speed things up. A restart resulted in a totally white screen for over 20 minutes, so I powered off with the switch, and powered on again with it a few minutes later. After three tries, including trying to boot from the installation disk, the iMac sprang to life again, and three of my external drives came on as usual, but not the La Cie that has my iPhotoLibraries and the iMovies I am working on. It is not a problem with power cords or the Firewire cables, as I swapped them out with the other drives, and everything works except this drive will not power up. Its light comes on, and the Firewire ports allow the other drive to come on, as this one is the one connected to the iMac, but the drive remains cold and quiet, just sits there with its blue light blinking.
I just need it to power on long enough to transfer my data to another drive.
I will settle for drive-recovery if that means I will get all my movies and photos back......anyone ever had to use a drive recovery service for this? If so, how did it work?
I do have backups for the photos, but not all of them as I don't usually backup every day. The movies will have to be recreated I can do this, it will just take lots of time......
not happy with this situation....any support/sympathy greatly appreciated!

Beverly Maneatis wrote:
.. The drive comes on and its light blinks, but does not progress to the drive powering up and the light becoming a solid nonblinking. ..
sorry to contradict you, Bev, but the drive itself has no lights.. :
(pic by wikipedia)
THIS is your drive with your precious data .. no blinks ...
ok, I'm a typically 'Tim Taylor/Home Improvement'-guy (incl. friends in hospital...), so maybe a daredevil about screwing things up/open (pun-taaaa). if you open the housing (usually 4 screws on bottom), you would see a power-supply, some small board for the interface electronics, a fan, some small board for some other electronics. and two cables: one with 4 cables (=power), one flat cable with ~20something wires (=data).. the drive is fixed with another four screws.. it is really dead easy, and you can not damage the drive itself, except you wear some angora and plastic sandals, to get some zillion of volts of static electricity into your fingertips ...
so, if you find a nice PC-guy, ask him to place the drive into another housing (usb or fw.. doesn't matter...).. for a pro, that is a 5min procedure.. I'm pretty sure, it will work! < fingers crossed > < throwing ash over shoulder > < murmering some Hun's incantaion >

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See this Help page: Copy or move video from your Event Library to an external ... http://support.apple.com/kb/ph2302
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Recover an iMovie from a failed external drive?

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