I have another HD with a bootable workbench on it, so possibly I could make that the master and the damaged HD the slave and try to repair it from that vantage point.
Angus,
I think this is your best bet. It sounds likely from the multiple disk errors that you have, that the disk is failing and getting bad blocks.
I was once told that if a modern disk starts showing bad blocks, it's screwed. This is because the disk already has a number of spare blocks on it. These spare blocks are used to replace bad blocks that the disk has found itself, so once these have ran out, you already have lots of bad blocks that you never knew about.
If you make your spare disk the master and install the appropriate tools or filesystem to access your partitions above the 4GB barrier, you should then be able to recover the data to the spare disk, or a new disk that is big enough.
Hope thats helpful
Mike
