I have a Hitachi 79fl and the drive will not spin at all. It just suddenly stopped. Does anyone know if I purchase a 79passkey and installed it, will I be able to extract the key or would I still need the drive spinning in order to extract it?

Yes, you would.

If the drive is ejecting etc, then the fault may be purely mechanical. If you have access to another Hitachi drive, try removing the drive controller board from yours and putting it into another unit. If this doesn't work then you'll probably need someone to remove the TSOP and dump the data from it.

Does anyone know a place that does this? or does the key extraction service? Perferably in the USA and in California if possible. Thank you.