Systematic454 :
Ok, I can report in success today! I was able to use Kernel for Windows Data Recovery as recommended by operate1 and mini1950. The program was able to identify a list of active hard drives in my system, scan for recoverable files and let me save the contents of my damaged drive to a different drive. In my case it seems that there was no physical damage to the drive just a corruption of the partition.
Thanks to everyone who commented and provided advice and I'm now happily saving this data to two other different HDDs to prevent a reoccurence of this issue from being so dire.
Systematic454, I apologize for the late response. Also, I am glad to hear that your attempt was successful.
To answer your question, after watching drives get recovered with professional data recovery equipment in the same circumstances where I have also seen MOST fail using software, I have come to understand that having the right tools is the key to successful recovery and happy times.
The lesson here: You did not know what was wrong with the drive.
That is the main thing anyone needs to know before they choose what utility to use to try to recover the data. Otherwise you might as well be standing in a room blind, shooting a pistol trying to hit the door knob and you don't even know where it is or if the door is even closed.
The reason for defaulting to a professional recovery company is because they have the tools that are able to test the hard drive at all points without causing more damage to a potentially failing drive. For example, there are devices that can read the information about a drive from a PCB detached from the drive, and without having to spin the drive up. These same devices are also able to shut down heads and also read certain parts of the platters without reading others.
Also what recovery programs do is first scan the whole drive, which wears out all the mechanical parts and potentially makes failing parts fail faster. Then once the scan is done if everything holds up, then it has to actually read and write the data to another location. So essentially it has to scan the drive twice. If you have a mechanical failure or even just enough bad sectors this will cause the drive to become unrecoverable, or fail at the very least, requiring a hardware replacement to continue the process.
At this point you will need to go with a recovery service, only you have just made their job potentially impossible, or at least a lot harder and more expensive for you.
The myth here: the consensus is that the end user (or even some of your computer repair shops) can try to recover the data, and then when the drive fails, they can always send it off to the pros, who can recover it.
The truth of the matter is this: Once the platter has been damaged enough the data is gone no matter how much money you pay.
Head crash - scratched platter = DATA GONE FOR GOOD.
So the moral of the story is you can play Russian roulette all you want. If there are six chambers and one bullet you have about a 16% chance of killing your self. However i don't think the odds are as good in data recovery.
If the data is important to you, its worth the investment and the rest at night.
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