I had a SATA drive (in a laptop) fail on me recently. It was going to be swapped out under warranty but no data would be recovered. I got hold of a SATA docking station (about €30) and plugged the drive in but couldn’t access it directly. However when I ran Vistas own backup application on another computer it succeeded in taking off all of the data which I subsequently restored to another drive. This application doesn’t attempt to backup any system files (which was where the damage was on my drive) and only went for the data. Worked like a dream and cant see that it would do any harm (by way of compromising other recovery attempts) as it only attempts to read and doesnt alter the drive contents. Might be worth a shot before involving the recovery experts.