Techiebrilliant said:
Wow, you are really smart, and wise! The next time I need to make toast I should ask you the obvious. Like I didn't know what the file did, where it came from, and obviously I checked it for a virus before doing anything. The PROBLEM was I accidently opened it before I had a chance to extract it. The drive was old anyway and it was just crap on it anyway.
Well, from reading your first post it didn't sound too much like you knew what you were doing... Especially since the only thing that should happen when you open an image file is that you launch whatever program you have associated with the extension and it will then try to do something to it, and not corrupt an entire harddrive....
Since you fail to give us the information about what program you have associated with the .iso, forgot to tell us that it was an old drive which might have died of natural causes, and didn't bother to tell us what "the usual tactics to get around this" are in your book, don't be surprised to get very general advice for beginners at first.
Now, with that out of the way, what have you tried (and what program is associated with image files on your machine)?
Have you tried using, as jobeard suggested, Partition Magic?
If that doesn't work, perhaps you'll have better luck with
SpinRite6... If the FAT has been written to a faulty sector, it should be able to recover it, and thus give you access to the drive's content.
