Back up your data folks

[NightPorter]

This means the disk isn’t completely hosed. You could try booting up Linux from a USB stick and see if you can mount it. If you can’t, then I’d try ddrescue to at least copy as much raw bytes as possible, so you can then search through it to see if anything interesting is there.

Project for my vacation maybe. Although I'm not holding my breath. I've made peace with having to start over.