I feel for you. I have just had a new 120 gig drive installed to hold my bryce stuff mostly, and it has just let me down. Sounded like an alarm clock as I was saving my last WIP to it. I saved it to my old drive quickly and rebooted only to have the PC refuse to boot other than in safe. Got it up now, but methinks the new drive is coming out toot sweet. Back to the drawing board. Hope yours gets sorted and you get your files back OK.

The greatest part of wisdom is learning to develop  the ineffable genius of extracting the "neither here nor there" out of any situation...."