Hi Tim,
Delighted to hear that you managed torecover your pics. I had a similar problem when a laptop crashed on me a few months ago.
Hard disks by their nature (both IDE, SCSI and SATA) are very prone to damage due to the slightest knock. Watch out over the next couple of months as the newer "Solid State" hard drives come on line. They have no moving parts and use ram for storage instead of the platters with the magnetic surface inside traditional HDD's.
The new Solid State Drives (SSD's) are still very expensive and have a relatively small storage capacity in comparison to traditional drives but hopefully the prices will start to tumble over the coming months ! !
Martin
