If it was a FAT32 volume, you’re screwed. If it was an NTFS volume, you’re not. Well, that is if you’ve enabled journaling on the volume, but then if you had it would have recovered. Yes, you lost 90% of your files, but you have backups, right?
:: Sigh :: I hate to break it to you Matthew, but I think the only option you have is to try another swipe at CHKDSK and see how it goes, or maybe use some advanced recovery console tools to try and bring back the disk from the dead, but that’s about it for getting most of your files back. Other than that, you can do the recovery program (which, as you said, gives you a 90% loss) or reformat the drive.
I hope this is a lesson to everyone that RAID 1 or a stack of 100’s of CDs is not a backup solution. Matthew just learned this the hard way, don’t do the same yourself.
You don’t have Journaling or CHKDSK would have told you. CHKDSK and some of the tools found in the recovery console will be able to help you with the MFT and restoring the drive’s partition. It’s tedius at best, but it can be done.
PS: you can go onto Ebay and get a DDS2 or DDS3 drive very cheaply, even for tape magazines, and they’re extremely reliable (just clean them every couple of months and they’ll work forever) and can old 4/8 GB of 12/24 GB (uncompressed/compressed).
