I found this browsing through somethingawful... here specifically and I thought it was interesting because a goon won a 360 last time.
19) ADVERTISING, site pimping, contests or any type of business promotion is not permitted. Soliciting for fraternal organizations, humanitarian causes or...
the same happened to me once with my external HDD when I kicked it. I had two partitions for it; I formatted one of those, and it started working. As for the data recovery... I only know of stellar data recovery.