That is exceptionally crappy luck. I suppose the only good thing about it is that the data can be recreated... my only disk failure took out my email archives a few years ago, of which I kept no backups.

Perhaps now is the time to buy one of those programmable robot arms and teach it how to insert the CDs for you? ;)

Yes, thankfully I did at least manage to salvage all the hard-to-replace bits. (One track I had to get the artist to send me an MP3 of, another album I had to borrow a friend's copy to rip the last two tracks of, and a third I had to rip in another friend's CD drive because mine didn't like it.)

World of Computers say they'll try using Ghost to copy the data off, and apparently they've seen it work miracles before on disks that ought to have been all-over bad sectors, so there might be a chance. We'll see...

You lost your un-backed-up email archives? I've no sympathy. "Doctor, it hurts when I do this!"

Yes, I'm quite aware of the stupidity factor involved. This was half a dozen years ago, and I did only need the one lesson in harsh reality :)