Any info on what happened or suggestions of recovery?


When operating, was the HDD too hot? Do you have a good clean/cool air
flow across the drive?

Even though this wouldn't have helped, if a partition has oggles of
unused space, I'll take Partition Magic 8.01 and make a backup
partition on the same drive. Yes - it might not have helped here!
However, here's my next suggestion... Install/reuse an old/nasty/slow
secondary drive and zip/compress your data frequently to it. Let's let
Gareth's experience push us closer into regular backups for
ourselves...

My heart goes out to you Gareth. Best wishes and good luck to you.