One final update I'd like to throw in:
After unable to access the data in the failed HDD by any possible means, I sent it to the folks at ESS Data Recovery (datarecovery.com). They told me that if they recovered the data, the would charge me $960 after discounts. I said cool, go ahead. After about 2 months of the "engineer trying to recover the data over and over again", they failed to recover anything and basically just had me waiting the whole time. Funny because when they first inspected it, said the chances of recovery were good, failed, and ultimately sent it back to me (at no cost, of course).
So I said, eh, the data I have in there is really important, let's give it another shot with these drive savers guys (drivesavers.com). So I sent it to them, and after initial inspection, the dropped me a tag of $2,300 (HOLY JEEBUZ!), and I said "well, recover the data first, then we can talk about money". Not really having hopes of recovering the data, but it doesn't hurt to give it a last time. Just a few days after that inspection, they call me again to tell me they were unable to recover the data. Of course I was not surprise and have to bite my finger for being a dumbass and not backing up that data.
Ironically, stuff like this has happened to me several times in the past, and I never seem to learn from it. 5 years ago I had a malfunction with my OS HDD, but eventually, was able to recover the data on it on my own. My laptop's OS almost entirely got corrupted, unable to boot by any means just 5 months ago. Using my haxorz skills and messing with things here and there, I got it boot once more. All those times, I've been lucky to recover the data, but not this time. This time luck said screw you with a kick in the face. Pictures, music, videos, and most importantly, important documents were in that HDD which is now gone.
I just got the HDD back from DriverSavers TODAY and called Western Digital to eat their shitty drive and send me a replacement. I haven't used my desktop the past 10 months because of this nonsense, and relying 100% on my Envy 173D laptop for everything ever since, where I played Dragon Age 2 but wouldn't dare to play Crysis 2 on it. Once WD sends me the replacement, I plan on using it with my other VelociRaptor and set a RAID 1 configuration. Along with that, I had bought a 3Tb external a couple of months ago for all the back up to go to. Lesson finally learned.
