I have a Samsung laptop with W7 and the HDD failed. I had been backing up with Samsung's proprietry mirror and backup software every couple of weeks to an external 1tb drive.. No problem, I can restore. No way, the rotten software wanted the original drive's hidden partition to work. I have restored most of the lost data from other ways but did lose some recent docs and emails. Lesson? Don't trust any of it. Find the most seemingly paranoid poster in the above posts and do what they suggest. I managed to get something back from the u/s HDD as well, by buying a £6 caddy and looking at it from the new installation.