I don’t have any help to offer. However, this might save someone else some trouble in the future.
[QUOTE=Half Man Half Wit]
… I’ve had a similar issue with a thumbdrive whose partition I’d accidentally nuked (I had it plugged in while re-installing Windows, didn’t recognize it for what it was and told the installer to kill the partition – yeah, not my smartest moment…
[/QUOTE]
If you’re reinstalling Windows, it’s best to first unplug any thumbdrives, external hard drives, secondary hard drives that are being used for data, and, in some cases, it might actually be necessary to unplug the camera card reader from the motherboard (or just the cable from the back of the card reader itself, if that’s more comfortable to you. Regardless, you’re going to be opening the case for this one.)
[QUOTE=DesertDog]
It’s not like you got anything to lose. There are data recovery services out there, but are they ever expensive. As in a company’s We Need This Data or Shut Our Doors category.
[/QUOTE]
Assumming you’re talking about the extreme of opening the hard drive in a clean room and physically accessing the platters… A local PC shop told me that they had shopped around, and they found a place in Michigan that would do this for less than $1k. That is, they found several places that would do it, but only one place that would do it for (slightly) less than $1k.
The last I read the freezer trick now does nothing with modern drives and can even make things much worse, as many hard drives now use fluid bearings - so freezing will simply stuff the bearings performance up.