Okay, I don't think my main PC's HD actually crashed. But I think it got a virus, because I corrupted my friend's video card  when I tried to back it up (the video-card corruption could've been caused by something on my IDE drive I plugged in soon after, but I'll say this: great work SimpleTech! That preinstalled trojan his virus scanner picked up on my new USB HD was appreciated. :banghead: )

I tried to connect the HD to an old PC I'm probably going to recycle. HD either unsupported or wouldn't recognize. I'll have to check with my friend later to see if the damage was localized to the video card.
I suppose I could sacrifice an old video card to get my translations stuff back when I get a new HD, so I can assemble the new PC hardware I bought.

Last backup of my translations directory to DVD was in September 2005.
If I can't recover my old stuff, here's the deal on the projects I haven't released since then...
3x3 Eyes - Advent of the Divine Demon : Lost the C source code to my translation tools. Otherwise, the important stuff is intact.
Deep Dungeon 2: safe.
Deep Dungeon 3: safe.
Galaxy Oddyssey: going to have to redo the compression stuff.
Hoshi wo Miruhito: going to have to redo the menu stuff. Easy but tedious.
Momotaro Densetsu: I think I lost the tools on the NES version. Mostly a decompressor, but I think it was a slight mod of my general dumping tool. Might consider doing the PCE version (MD Turbo) if there's some good debugging stuff available.
Magic Poipoi Poitto: I have some work from a few months earlier. I think I just lost some graphics hacks. Still have the compression tools and sources.
Monster Maker Kids: VWF needs to be redone.
Nadia: Lucky I still have the Jelly Boy 2 graphics stuff, which eerily uses identical compression, except for the endian of the decompressed size (little-endian 65816 vs. big-endian 68000). I believe it shouldn't be too hard to reproduce the script stuff. (well, I later realized JB2 has some erroneous bank boundary detection going on that I had to account for in the final patch, but I think the JB2 compressor I have is just the Nadia one with flipped endian).
Pikinya!: Safe. Someday I'll put my mind to it and get all the graphics translations done.
SD Gundam Gaiden SNES: Waiting for translation, I don't think it's really progressed much since then. So, I guess it's safely backed up.
Square Tom Sawyer: I think it's safe.
Unannounced NES RPG (yo, Sheex): I believe it's safe.
Unannounced NES platformer (odino): Going to have to reinsert. Lucky there's not a whole lot of text, and I have much more free time than before.

I really couldn't follow your story very well... but I'm convinced you can salvage the data.

Did you fix the virus problem? I'd use an online virus scanner or at the very least one that is up to date with it's data files. Do a full scan. Take care of that first. A virus probably didn't hurt the hard drive physically in any way. If it really was just a virus, once you've gotten rid of it, you can proceed to recover files. If the virus deleted any files, you'll probably want to scan this hard drive as a secondary hard drive. I'd not run this hard drive any longer than necessary. If it's written to, more deleted files would become unrecoverable. Even with some light use though, I've seen about 95%+ recovery anyway. It should be OK for a virus scan. Just don't go saving files to it.

Then.. if you know your hard drive is at least recognized in a PC, you can hook it up as a secondary hard drive in your PC. This way, you can boot it up on one hard drive and recover the files from it using an application that specializes in this kind of thing. I can give you a recommendation when I get home. I successfully recovered data from several hard drives with it. One had hardware problem(was not recognized by Windows either), another simply had the file table deleted. Both recovered probably 95% of the files successfully.

In summary, I think you can recover your files if you want to. It'll take some work and time, but it can be done for free unless you can't find a second hard drive to use as a primary temporarily.

Wow, that sucks.  You have my sympathy.
I've usually been able to restore from any losses - or at least my losses have usually been limited to secondary disks and recoverable filesystems.  But then again, I'm paranoid about this kind of stuff.


Mednafen is a very good PC Engine emulator with good debugging capabilites.
http://mednafen.sourceforge.net/releases/

The scripts for the Momotarou games on the PC Engine are stored in some sort of compressed format that I didn't solve yet - I looked at it for a couple of hours once, but put it aside.

If you're interested, I could give you the (limited) information I have, and walk you through how I got that far (and Mednafen's key codes and features) in an IM session to give you a running start, and acquaint you with the PC Engine's tools and information base.

I've managed to get my old HD set up as a slave on a new PC. Copying the whole translations directory over to my new HD as I write.
At least I got the real important (personal photos that of course can't be replaced) stuff copied before.

Now, on to the stuff that can be replaced, but would be a pain if I had to (downloaded games, website stuff).

Going to have to dig around to see if I can find where Lookout Express stores its address book.