Sympathy, same stuff here in reverse order. My hard drives failed and now my pen for my tablet is broken... so aggravating.

Damn, seems like we all have horrible hardware failures during big commissions; happened to me and my printer.

Is it accessible at all? I.e. can you use it but it shows up empty?

If so, you could potentially use data recovery software to retrieve stuff. I've done it in the past. The only things it had problems with were particularly large single files (like 4gig movie files).

If it's basically "oh fuck no this is totally a brick", yeah, your options are either professional data recovery ($$$$$$$) or restarting your shit from scratch. :C

Let me know when your current batch is done, and I'll probably get a commish to help out. :V

completely inaccessible currently. It doesn't show up at all when run as a slave drive, and windows can't see it to boot up as a master. We're going to try and see if running it as an external has any beneficial effect, but my friend gave me the wrong power cord for his external SATA case so I need to wait until Monday to get a hold of that.

Ugh, good luck. :C

Shit, this happened to me recently.
How is everyone's HDD failing this months? You're the 10th person I know who that happened to.

Hope you get that sorted out soon, dead hard drive sucks hard.