It doesn't sound good for you. I will post your updated info and see what they suggest. Was the drive dropped or knocked over in some way during the transfer or prior? That is the only way I could see physical damage happening which is what you could be describing. As for data recovery services...it is very expensive. When my wifes laptop was accidentally thrown into a wall by me (oops) I had to recover the data because she is a teacher and her gradebook and tests were still on the drive. The drive would fail halfway through the file transfer, but at least it was working for a bit. I contacted a company about physical drive damage recovery, and it was going to be about $500 to have it taken apart and recovered. I was able to get a program that worked through the grinding, but like I said it would work for the first half of the drive. I don't think that would work for you in this case.
The drive was external and sat on my shelf. It didn't move in 2 and 1/2 years, so I see no way it could have been physical. Like I said, I was in the middle of a huge file transfer, probably the biggest I have ever done on that HD, and it just died halfway through.
I'm gonna freeze it overnight again, if that doesnt work...oh well, live and learn.
