So, horror story for everyone.

I bought two spanking new HDD's. MM!! Gbitage.

I removed all my old HDD's, physically labelled them, and was preparing to install all new HDD's (fresh sys install included!)

To make sure what HDD was what, I popped each OLD HDD (data filleD!) into a Thermaltake Blacx toaster.. surprisingly BOTH couldn't be read. I didn't have static on my hands! I'm certain of it. I touched metal, touched wood, before beginning this all.

Thinking that was strage, I hauled up the new sys, installed Win XP (of course!) on the new HDD, and now the two OLD HDD's (data filled!) that were entered into the toaster cannot be read. And they had tons of data on them.

I read about MBR's being nuked and it sounds like that is what it is. But I'm at a loss what to do. There are so many MBR recovery programs out there, I kind of feel overwhelmed. I don't want to lose my data by just pikcing one, yet it seems so close within reach, I'm not panicking anymore..

Anybody have a play by play that I could follow? I just don't want to spend $900 on data recovery centers if I can do this myself..