disaster averted
good news - i managed to rebuild the boot sector on my dead hard-drive (like you do) and have managed to recover all my photo archives - (more than 44,000 photos or 62.7GB). I also saved my 'pending' blog photos including of snow i still haven't posted yet !
so, hoorah for TestDisk which is great for recovering dead hard drives or harddrives or hard-drives
Excellent news!
It's hard to describe the pain you feel from a dead hard drive ... don't know if you've suffered it before but I'm glad you were ultimately spared it!