Don’t want to give you any false hope here and I am no expert in data recovery from hard drives, but some reading of the subject suggested that this is due to the SATA cable (no such cable in the MCH) or SATA controller on the mainboard - which means if you shuck the MCH HDD and plug it into a PC SATA port where the PC can also boot from a USB-Linux recovery flash drive, you may be able to get a lot of data back. A proper SATA port is much better and faster than a USB-SATA adapter that you can get for $30. Any PC desktop with two SATA ports from the last 5 to 8 years would suffice and you can often get one fairly cheap on Ebay or Good Will thrift shop for $50 to $75.
You should also read the kernel log from the debug_logs.zip and search for ‘ata-1’ and take a picture of what HDD you have in your MCH. This way you can also make a claim against WDC for putting such a crappy drive in the MCH. See this thread here:
