Thanks Tony, much as I expected.

I have tried the "gentle tap of the drive on the desk" approach to data recovery now. Don't laugh, I have recovered several gig of data from a seemingly completely dead disk before with this method. Obviously not one to try unless you are sure the disk is really dead.

In this case it didn't help though.

The plus side is that it is now nice and quiet here in my home office, boy are the fans in this beast noisy...