I'm far too new to MS to be of use on the Forum yet, but I can offer a good tip for file recovery.

Try Active-Undelete, which can be found here: http://www.active-undelete.com/ - complete disaster! After taking it to two "experts" who accomplished exactly nothing (they couldn't even begin to explore the drive without intact partitions), I starting doing some online research and found the above product.

I attached the failed hard drive to a system with a working environment as drive D, then installed ActiveUndelete (AU) on the good system and let it have a go at the failed drive. It was amazing; AU took about an hour to examine the drive, then found 99.99% of *everything*, including the various partitions, folders etc. I used it to copy everything over to a new drive (preserving the folder layouts) and got back all but about 10 files out of over 300,000. This product saved my a$$ at a critical time, and I highly recommend it. Pretty cheap too; about US$40. Other than as a satisfied and relieved user, I have no connection to the product or company. And FYI, I use Acronis TrueImage for my daily full-system backups; also a good application. I keep AU, Acronis and SpinRite on emergency-recovery CDs and floppies now.

I don't have SATA drives, but according to Steve Gibson's FAQ http://www.grc.com/sr/faq.htmson's gang has developed in this product - his knowledge of the low-level hardware of drives and controllers is comprehensive and SpinRite can really dig into them. He's always preferred to do his final coding in assembler for speed and control, and it shows; his products are incredibly tiny by today's standards of code bloat. Used to run into him at Comdex years ago and he's the real deal - an ubergeek. As long as I'm hyping his stuff, if you go to his site http://www.grc.com/default.htm