For the last little bit, I've been using a Seagate SRD00F2 3TB 'Expansion' drive to house all my ripped/encoded DVDs and Steam/GOG Backups of any large games. Friday this stopped working, the drive wouldn't power on, the disk would spin up when plugged in, and it wasn't recognized in Windows or Mint. After working on it for the weekend, using Testdisk and a couple other 'free' utilities(Easeus, Active@, iCare, Find and Mount, Pandora), I've reached an impasse.
Teskdisk can't seem to recover the partition completely, though it can see the partition and all the files, and it has labeled the drive as 'NTFS', it can't actually get the drive to a state where I can mount it. I've tried a number of trial programs, and I'm sitting here about to bite the bullet on a $70 purchase for Minitool Power Data Recovery, which can see all the files, sizes/etc and preview image files.
Before I do that though, I thought I'd throw the question out there of has anyone had any experience recovering a damaged hard drive partition, or data recovery software in general? If anyone has any advice, or experience to lend, I'd love to hear from you