Last night my media server may have died; fsck fails with ATA read errors.

I'm hoping I can recover the data: a bunch of movies, music and documents spread across two 500GB HDDs in a logical volume group. Really, I should have mirrored the discs, but that would halve the available capacity (and I have/had more than 500GB worth of data). Who would expect a HDD to die within 12 months?  I figured by the time the disc started acting up I'd have another drive in-place.

Worse: since I never got around to sorting out automatic backups there's stuff on there I really don't want to lose. Not just the music and movies.

Still, HDDs are fairly cheap at the moment (~£80 for 1TB).