Hardware

Sounds like the drive is destroyed. If you can not format it up there is very little chance of being able to recover the data without sending it away to a specialized Data Recovery Company who can dismantle the drive and recover he data off the platters.

This is both time consuming and expensive but that is something that you'll have to work out for yourself if the data is worth the cost of recovery. On Monday do a ring around or E-Mail a few of the Data Recovery Places in your area to see what they guess will be the cost of recovering the data. Any figure that they give you will be a loose figure as it all depends on time taken but it will give you a rough idea of the costs involved.

If the drive is still UG the makers will accept a letter from the Data Recovery place and honor their Warranty so you'll not loose everything.

But treat this as a "Learning Experience" and always Backup your DATA to something other than a HDD as things like what you have experienced are an all too common.

A CDRW or DVDRW is a very cheap way to backup your data and while not a perfect and permanent solution it does serve to have a working copy when things go wrong. Just remember to make one before you even start any work on the computer and you will never go wrong.

Col

Hi,

In your situation I would rather recommend Active@ partition recovery tool to try restore partition. That tool helped me before in a simmilar situation and I'm pretty sure that will be of a good use for you.

http://www.partition-recovery.com/