Couldn’t find anything about the blink pattern, but according to Maxtor’s website (Maxtor now owns Quantum’s hard drive business now and does the support for them), if the platters don’t spin, they refer you to the Warranty center (ie, dead drive 
). Which the OP has already determined.
However, I did have one clarification - you said you tried every Master/Slave jumper combination - does that statement also include Cable Select? Most systems sold in the past several years require that both drives on an IDE channel be jumpered for Cable Select, and the first drive on the the cable (farthest away from the motherboard) is usually the primary, at least for those drives using the 80-pin IDE cables.
I am going to assume that this was tried as well. If the drive is truly dead, there really isn’t much you can do. Yes, you can use data recovery services such as the ones you mentioned - however, their prices are usually so exhorbitant (with good reason - if they’re opening up damaged hard drives, it needs to be in a clean room and requires some specialized equipment, especially if their services don’t violate hard drive manufacturers’ warranties - ontrack used to have this certification, but I don’t remember if they do anymore or not) that it is usually not worth it for anything but really, really rich people and businesses that have critical data.
For instance these guys (cddataguys.com), claim they have some of the lowest data recovery prices anywhere. For your 40GB drive, it would cost $1049! (Somehow, I think it might be slightly different now, as their price list doesn’t go over 50GB, implying that it hasn’t been updated recently - but that should give you an idea of the costs involved). I remember a time when I was given a price of $100 per MB! (yes, Megabyte :eek: )!
Basically, if the hardware is damaged, for most consumers they just might as well throw the drive away and hope they backed their important data off-drive somewhere.
One thing you might try, since you’ve really got nothing else to lose, is to stick the drive in the freezer for a bit. I have seen reports of that trick working on recalcitrant drives, but I’ve never done it myself, can’t vouch for the validity, disavow any knowledge of any damage that might result to the computer itself, etc, etc. Use at your own risk, YMMV, yadda, yadda, yadda.
One other solution comes to mind - and again, all usual disclaimers - don’t try this at home, this will void any warranty that might exist, could damage anything and trigger Ragnarok in the process, etc. - apply. My brother and I had a similar situation. We had a WD drive that was dead as a doornail, but we were pretty sure it was just a problem with the drive circuitry rather than a physical issue with the drive/platters themselves. We were able to acquire a hard drive of the exact same model off of ebay, and swapped the circuit boards. The formerly dead hard drive was recognized immediately. We rescued the data off of the drive, then formatted it and it has been functioning normally ever since, but we don’t use it for anything we might want to conceivably keep.
Hope this info helps