Well 2 yrs after the first one had a burned TVS the RMA'ed replacement is now not working properly.
Today started getting an I/O error when trying to access this sata secondary drive. (sata 01)
Rebooted and windows explorer doesn't recognize it at all now.. Storage management doesn't see it.

It spins without any noises so I used a sata/ide to USB bridge and now Storage management sees it as 'disc 1 unknown - not initialized'
tried accessing it using ontrack data recovery, easeus data recovery and partition recovery but they dont see it.

any ideas? should I initialize it then try to recover data?
should i try plugging it into an xp box? i've tried accessing it using 2 vista pc's and also ubuntu, knoppix & gparted.
Thanks gurus

NO! Never do this!

If you want you can test it with MHDD but I bet that you are not able to access sectors at all.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

one head is flaky and the entire drive cant init normaly cause of it probably.

Thanks for the help so far. I've been checking out mhdd trying to understand how it works. Is it easier if the bad drive is sata 0 ?
What is the command that should be run? Scan?

Any other ideas to try and salvage the data without bringing it to a service?