[John Rogers]

Damm Milt that is a rough thing to have happen. I had a drive freeze up that was attached to my Roku box and the freeze trick didn't work either. I ended up with a program called "Disk Drill" that took control of the bad drive away from the PC operating system and it was able to manually control the drive and I recovered about 95% of the movies and music I had on there. It ran for a total of THREE days before stopping when there was nothing else it could recover.

I would suggest getting several external drives and an enclosure for them and never ever save anything to the "C" drive. I would suggest a couple of 8TB drives and they'll give you enough storage for a long time. I would also suggest making at least TWO emergency OS recovery thumb drives since as the saying goes "two = one and one = 0". Good luck getting everything back to normal.
John Rogers the oldracer