It's a Sad Day in Jumbledtown

As is my normal practice, I do a backup of my files and software once per week. I have a more time intensive backup that I do once a month (and store in an off-site location). Today, I turned on the external hard drive which holds my movie and TV show collection... and was greated with "whee whEE whee whEE" (never a good sound to hear from your hard drive). I tried everything I could - plug in the USB cable instead of firewire cable, try different cables, connect the drive to another computer, use a special USB tool for connecting internal drives to a USB port. Nothing worked. The drive is shot and and I can't get any Windows (XP nor Vista) to recognize it. *cry* I have two problems. First, the movie drive is my second largest hard drive, so when I do backups, I'm not able to back up all the movies and TV shows I've accumulated over the years. Second, I recently upgraded the hard drive in my TiVo, and in the process, repurposed the movie backup hard drive (because I didn't yet know the original movie drive was dead). Now I have no movie drive, and no movie backups! The movies I can get again, for the most part, as I have the original DVD's. But, I'm really mourning the loss of the TV shows I've collected, most of which don't play on TV, now. Shows such as Spy School (where brits learn to be MI6 spies), Taken, and more. This is the second time I've lost the movie drive. At least the first time, I had a 50% backup to restore from. Now I've got nothing. *cry*