Michael has tried all his tricks, but the hard drive is totally FRAK-ED. And apparently it’s a known issue. We can send it to the manufacturer and have them recover it; It will only cost $1k.
Trying really hard not to cry and/or scream obscenities.
Update:
I misunderstood what Michael said: it’s a known issue from the manufacturer, but the item is no longer covered under warranty so we are sending it to another trusted company to retrieve the data and they are the ones that charge so much for their service.
In the meantime I’ll be buying two more external drives to set up a raid array to put all my data on when it gets back to me. I’ll also burn off all data to dvd. Both are things I kept planning to do but just never made time to do. Hard lesson to learn especially considering I KNOW BETTER.
And I just hope the company can retrieve all the data. Everything is on that drive