[OT] Plea for help

[Richmond Mathewson]

I took my 1.4 TB external hard-drive up to the school; partitioned into 
8 HFS+ partitions and 2 DOS ones. Tried to reformat one of the HFS+ ones 
as DOS at which point the whole Hard-Drive went down.

This was with Disk tools on a G3 iMac running Mac OS 10.4.11

Both Mac and Linux say the thing is completely unformatted; and I have 
lost my backups for the last 15 years.

Advice gratefully received  [ apart from "always backup everything onto 
97 seperate devices . . . :( ]