I didn't have much knowledge about OEM that could enable me to give some useful information but this is really informative conversation going on. Thanks.
What have you tried thus far. I have gotten quite a bit of info from crapped drives before with a few choice programs..
XD Thanks for the offer, but I've given up on it now. I tried using RecoveryMyFiles, went into DOS to try copying the disk, tried mounting a sector-by-sector image of it, quick formatting it and then using recovermyfiles and I've tried mounting it into Linux from a LiveCD (worked on another computer). Nothing worked - but the 70GB of videos I can recover from the hard copies and off-site backups. It's just the 700mb worth of files with sentimental value that I couldn't get back, probably because they were encrypted so none of the file recovery programs would recognise the file headers anyway. But even still, there's no point now because I've wiped the drive completely and destroyed the sector-by-sector image I had. Thanks.
Yep...If you encrypt the drive, you relegate yourself to losing all when it fails, or paying a crap-ton of money for maybe results.. I have never seen the need for encrypting a personal drive, only some commercial applications.. Backups are priceless, and drives are cheap!!!
When you have a family like mine, and chat logs like mine, you don't leave them unencrypted!!! Yeah, once I get a job and am no longer flat broke, I'm going to get a few drives and set up RAID on everything mildly important.