This happened to me about a month ago too. Luckily I'd backed up all my tracks about 8 months ago, so I didn't lose a lot of that, as I hadn't done a lot since then. I lost all my TV shows, all my films, all my albums, all my instrumentals, all my game saves and all my porn though. Fuckin annoying. It just feels weird being on this pretty much blank hard drive without my stuff, I'm still mourning for my data and I haven't got over it yet lmfao. I'm still trying to recover it though.

I've fuckin tried every recovery program I can find, but none of them work. I have this problem where it scans it and then the drive just disappears. I have no idea why it's so massively corrupted, but for whatever reason it is. On one of these programs it let me see the root directory though, and on that I could see all the folders on my C: drive, I couldn't go into them, but they're still there, whether or not what's in them is still there and useable I don't know. But it's still given me some hope.

Seein as how you use Linux, you might have heard of Knoppix. It's meant to be fuckin good to recover stuff. I've tried the same thing as you, putting the drive as a slave to my new one, and I got Knoppix started once with it. I tried it again though and it didn't like it for certain reasons.

So what I'm gonna do is buy a hard drive enclosure, put my old hard drive in it, hook it up with USB, and then try using Knoppix to recover it, and transfer the files to my new hard drive. After that's done, and it IS going to work (positive thinking), then I'll format the hard drive and use it as an external hard drive for back up's.

Here's a link to the Knoppix site:

http://www.knoppix.net/

I downloaded the CD version via torrent here:

http://torrent.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/

The bottom one is the one I got.