I have been employed many times over my 22 year IT career to restore data thought to have been lost from a hard drive. It can be restored in most cases as the platters (disks) in the drive are rarely destroyed in a HDD failure. Equally, it is quite easy to replace the circuit board on the drive itself (buy second identical drive off e-bay for a few dollars) which may have fried and the data is immediately available again. Dont throw the disk away, if you dont knwo how to get at the data yourself, find someone in the industry who can at least try to retrive it, you may be surprised. Dennis.

P.S. Paul, why didnt you request a restore from tape at work??????