Wow.
Dude, drives are so so so so cheap now, for me, there really is no excuse for not having the following:
- main drive
- mirrored bootable backup of that drive (so you can carry on working when your drive dies)
- cloud storage back up (so you can access your shit whereever you are)
- physical off site back up (for when your place is robbed or burns down)
How much would the 250 gig of content you might have just lost cost to replace? I wager more than the 20 bucks a spare 250 gig drive would cost!
I know this isn't helping you and I'm not meaning to sound harsh but if you don't have a back up and redundancy for that back up, when drives are so damn cheap then it's a bit silly, really.
Let us know how the recovery goes though...