Wow, what the heck is going on???!
 
Friday afternoon I have to take my Mom to a doctor's appointment and I'm turning a corner at 5mph and do a 180 with a bounce off of the curb thanks to ice on the road.  Fortunately, I didn't hit anyone and only slightly bent my front right wheel.  Then, going home, I'm stopped on one freeway about an 1/8th of a mile before the on ramp to the next freeway when someone in a large Dodge Caravan plows into the stopped car behind me which is then launched into my poor, beat up little car.  Amazingly, I have very little damage that I could see, just a cracked and scratched bumper with some paint transfer - though the car does pull to the left now (and that's new).  Maybe I'll get some insurance money that I could put towards a newer vehicle (already planned for February).  The poor girl behind me has a LOT of damage to the front and rear of her car plus we both got slight whiplash headaches.
 
Saturday afternoon.  After waiting over a week for my new monitor to arrive at the store, I get an email that says it's ready for pickup.  I go out and get it, come home, then spend too much time getting my computer ready.  I install the new monitor on the arm, turn it on and...  The screen is bad.  Something underneath the surface is obviously broken along the top (wavy areas of black), the screen flickers and it doesn't recognize the correct resolution...  Back it goes.
 
Today (Sunday for those of you that are a bit slower).  I turn on my external hard drive enclosure and it tells me that my new 4TB drive needs to be formatted...  Now I had originally had an Orico enclosure that I bought in October to get all the data off of about a dozen smaller, older drives and copy it to a newer, much larger drive.  Then I made a copy of the new drive for a backup.  During this process, I started having issues with the older drives (which I tried to reuse for temporary file copies) where they were corrupt or rendered unformatted.  At first I thought it was because they were old and I was glad I had gotten the data off them.  Then I put one of the new drives in the enclosure and got the same error...  I immediately stopped using the Orico device and emailed them (on November 2nd).  I've never heard back from them.  Back to today.  So I put the first large drive into my newer enclosure (from a different manufacturer and one I've had no issues with) and it says it needs to be formatted.  I just got the other large drive (the backup of the first) and... it's having issues too.  I'm just now starting to come to the realization that I may have lost 20+ years worth of data thanks to trying to back it up and protect it...  Next up is to try and recover what I can using special software (but where am I supposed to copy it to?) and then scan the drives for errors (should I assume they'll be ok?).  All I know is this sucks.

Bummer weekend!  Stay away from me 

Never assume!  :D:D sorry your week end is miserable.  Around here I have bad weeks when I'm poly tickally incorrect.  Too much bottom up management combined with micro management.  (horrible combination)

That's a bad bead craigb(ITYRN).
 
Hope the monitor gets sorted out.
 
Cars? Well I say... drive 'em till they fall apart.

I can't be the only one who feels that the percentage of stuff which has to go back to the store is slowly creeping upwards. It seems like I spend half of my shopping time waiting in customer service lines with a receipt and a faulty item in my hand. Today it was a pair of waterproof boots "IMPENETRABLE BY WATER" according to the box, which turned out to let water in at the toes after a 20 minute walk in light slush.

That hard drive thing sucks. I too lost years of data when an external failed a few years ago. It's still in the closet in the vain hope that one day someone will release a sort of hard drive reviving magic wand. Ultimately though, the loss hasn't been so bad. There's a school of thought which says you should put everything you don't need in trash bags in the garage and if you haven't opened any of those bags in the space of a year, just throw them out without a second thought. It's a great way of ridding yourself of the junk you tend to accumulate with the deluded idea that it might come in handy some day. Not once have I really needed anything on that drive since it died, so I should just trash it.

Yo, Craig. If you watcheed the data transfers happen it's likely there. Maybe do a Linux install onto a thumbdrive or sumthin' and I bet the files are there (unless something totally stupid happened). If not check the original drives using the same method.
 
I get weird formatting and driver errors within Windows form time to to time on flash drives and whatnot that are totally fine (with all files accessable) with a "cancel" and/or remount.
 
tl;dr
 
Your old data is likely there (unless you managed to totally delete it which... I'm assuming you personally would have noticed). You just might have to kerjigger things to make the drives poop it out.
 
If Windows is being a dick and Win based restore programs are being dicks just some old school hackimination might get you where you need to be.
 
Zoinks.

I once used R-Tools to recover data from a drive that failed in SWMBO's PC that Windows wouldn't even recognize.  Best $50 I ever spent because after the drive crashed I was informed that it had been my responsibility to keep backups all along. 

sharke
Not once have I really needed anything on that drive since it died, so I should just trash it.

I had that a couple of years ago, got all stressed when an external HD died and tried several avenues to get the data off it and failed..so far, it hasn't impacted on my life whatsoever.

Its the curse of 2016, I tell ye!

It came, to pass.