Put me out of my misery

[ByteJuggler]

In these types of circumstances I usually try to image/clone the entire disk onto a known working one (and possibly another as well), and only *then* try to run recovery tools. This has at least 2 effects/benefits: 1) You don't make what might be a bad situation worse by corrupting the problem drive further in the attempts to fix it and 2) You can then perform logical/filesystem recovery on a physically working disk knowing that if one program/approach messes up, you can start again with another tool/approach from the other image (or clone the disk again.) To image/clone the disks I tend to use something like TRK I can attempt to help you use that to do some troubleshooting/imgaging if you like. I'm on MSN, so msg me if you want.