"andy" wrote in message
...

For recovery only;
I've had luck in the past by freezing dead hard drives, leave it over
night
in the freezer, have everything ready on your pc, i.e. ide and power
cables

Thanks for the advice, but I tried that already to no avail.

a.

You're out of luck then I'm afraid. If the data is that critical then don't
do anything else to it, contact a professional data recovery operation. Be
prepared to pay a lot of money (2nd mortgage) though, these people are not
cheap, and for good reason. They will probably strip your drive and mount
the physical disks in their own apparatus under clean room conditions - this
is what costs.

Or write it off to experience and learn from it. Do regular backups, and
remember backups are useless unless you test them and ensure they work.

--
Apollo