So I had a dead external drive from a client to fix. I tried EVERYTHING with this one, and was by far the most troublesome so far.

I followed my colleague Joe's advice, did the whole put the drive in the freeze, wrapped up thing, then use some windows based drive recovery tool. NOTHING worked.

Just when I was about to give up, I remembered a utility that was mentioned during a DL.tv episode - Spinrite.

Now this will run off a boot cd, and slowly check/repair the drive. I popped out the drive from the external enclosure and hooked it up to a spare computer for 4 weeks - it took that long.

Of course the client had no backup, (now I see why specialized drive recovery companies charge thousands).

After this process, I then used Y Copy with the drive attached to a Windows machine. This allowed me to copy and skip dead files. In the end I was able to get back 95% of the data (from a 120gig drive), where as previous attempts were only able to get a few megs before copy/rescue options failed!