I have a hard drive which is about 4 years old. It has stopped working and I even tried to follow internet tutorials and visited customer support offline channel also. But they all told me that it is impossible to recover the data now. And here, this guy is trying for 17 year old hard drive in a much more pathetic condition. I guess common sense is not so common anymore.
If your drive has an electronics or mechanical issue and stops working because of it, what do you expect from "internet tutorials"? Which offline customer support did you visit? Your local computer hardware dealer? Serious and sophisticated data recovery from storage media likely isn't their field of expertise. It's easier to dismiss than tackle a challenging problem.
Who is "they all"? (Never mind, it's more of a rhetorical question.)
Professional data recovery services with years of experience, e.g. like Ontrack, CBL Data Recovery, SalvageData, ..., are usually able to recover data even from dead drives. The really big ones have large stocks of spare parts for all kinds of old and current harddrives. If you really need the data and are willing to pay for it, those companies even disassemble the platter stacks and scrape data from your individual platters with specialized equipment. But this will cost you a few grands...
I'm no expert in this field and I have also doubts that data recovery from a drive that has been exposed to nature's elements for years has any chance of success due to corrosion and moisture doing their nasty work of destruction.