Firstly, let's not go there with the lectures about backing up. I don't have a recent backup of this drive and I know it was completely retarded not to do so. So, I've already given myself all the grief possible over this.

My secondary data hard drive has failed. It is 500gb and has pretty much everything on it, all our pictures from the last 10 years, music etc etc etc. I do have a backup of it, but only a previous failed drive that I still have which I have been able to access, but it is about 2 years since that drive was used, so technically, everything from the last 2 years or so is lost.

I spent fucking ages trying to access the drive yesterday by connecting it to a USB. I tried lots of combinations, but just couldn't get it to work. I could hear it spinning, but nothing more. I tried it on Rosie's laptop and that would recognise that there was a device connected to the USB and it could identify it as a Western Digital 500gb (it showed the part number), but it wouldn't show as a drive that I could open.

Today, however, I have plugged it in and I got the 'Autoplay' window to appear. Now it shows as a drive. I can see both partitions, one of which I can access fine. But the more important of the two, I cannot. This is the message I get.....

"the disk structure is corrupted and unreadable"

I now that's bad, but from what I have read, as long as the OS recognises the drive, all is not lost. So, what can I do to retrieve the data? Software?