The resurrection
After almost of month of calling data recovery houses, searching on ebay, negotiating with second hand merchants from overseas, and general waiting for the post, my replacement drive arrived today.

Popped the new drive into my machine, formatted it, ran a few tests. Yup, it works.

Pulled it out, swapped the dead controller on my old drive with the controller from the new drive. Plugged it in, booted, ran fdisk. Oh my goodness, the partition table in intact. I'm so lucky.

Mount the drive. Wow, the superblock is still intact. Read the data from the drive. That's all there too.

Managed to recover every single file on the toasted drive. Very very very happy Paul. Cost, about $AU100 vs $AU1000 for professional data recovery.

Moral of the story: Keep backups of your junk drives. Just because you wouldn't put anything of value on your squid cache drive, doesn't mean that you won't (in a moment of stupidity) decide it's a good place to store your six years worth of mail archives.

Other News
I have a great new way of making money using my computer and the internet! I can work from home, set my own hours, and earn TAX-FREE income. Yes, it really does work!

No, I'm not going to tell you what it is. If everyone was doing it, then I wouldn't be able to make anywhere near as much.