> Are you sure it was a total loss? There are some pretty good open source programs you can run and try to recover the data as long as the drive still spin Dat

> Are you sure it was a total loss? There are some pretty good open source programs you can run and try to recover the data as long as the drive still spin Data recovery will likely work, since they mechanically work and Windows does see them as drives, just no data (says uninitialized). My initial thought was it's just the partition table that was corrupted, so something like TestDisk might easily restore the table and allow me to extract my data. Otherwise something more serious would be needed... at this point though, I can't remember what's on the drives, so my effort level is minimal. My "total loss" statement was more along the lines of using hard disks for backups. Having a corrupted partition table from the drive sitting on a shelf isn't a good thing to rely on for backups. If it were business data, it would have been on tapes instead of disks.