Thanks for the info.
Fortunately I didn't have to go for the pcb repair or swapover.
While having a casual chat with one of the guys they mentioned they had a spanned ghost image taken from the drive. They presumed because they were unable to browse the image using ghost explorer the image was no good.
Wrong assumption!
I took the image from them and forced a restore from image by ignoring any error. The image did have errors.
After the drive showed as RAW so then I performed a simple software recovery on the drive and got back what looks like a 100% recovery, 40gb of docs & pics, pst etc.
I did check and with a bit of tweaking the recovered system was bootable.