And much drinking?

Haha been there too, actually messed up the whole partition table, so the whole drive was lost. You know that once you reboot it's 100% gone, but there's still that last slim possibility that someone has a way to reconstruct it... but you can't get to it because your machine is hooped and you can't get online to research...
...thus explains my OCB (Obsessive Compulsive Backingup)

In the end it wasn't a firmware problem, it was a broken reading head. Seagate is replacing the HDD.
Data recovery wouldn't have necessarily worked and it was way too much for my means anyway, and in the end I didn't care too much for the data.
Already started a new game of Morrowind. And of course I lose a lot less time. Can't wait to start DivDiv again too. This time I want to head to the dwarves' lair as soon as possible to get godly weapons and armor early on.