OT: corrupted .NEF files

[Keith Gerling <Keith@GumPhoto.com>]

I've recently returned from Turkey, where I was fortunate enough to see
great places, meet wonderful people, and eat fabulous food.  This was my
first trip where I relied totally upon digital capture methods, and I
traveled with a thoroughly tested 20 GB hard drive backup.  Said drive
started acting suspect as soon as I started storing my precious shots, and I
became very concerned.  Fortunately, a very patient Loris Medici humored my
paranoia by allowing me frequent inspections of my drive by using his
laptop.  My files were indeed present, although we could not see the .NEF
files, an anomaly I attributed to a missing Photoshop plugin (or whatever).
I switched over to taking mostly .jpeg files, figuring that would lesson the
load on the drive.  However, I did continue to shoot .NEF for those
"important" shots.

Cut to the chase:  I return home to find a hardrive in total disarray.  Some
files OK. many showing gibberish for names.  After a day or so of panic and
stupidity, I find an application, PC Inspector, which over the course of 16
hours rescues most of my files.  Whew!  The first files I had uploaded to
the drive, mostly Nikon raw files (.NEF) were fine. 90% of the .jpegs are
fine.  But the later .NEF files (the aforementioned "important" ones, while
recovered by PC Inspector, still will not open in Photoshop (unexpected EOF)
or with Nikon Capture (non-supported file).  On many of them I see a
thumbnail.  Looking at the Hexcode of the file I can see that there IS some
kind of data in man of them, while some of them are totally empty.

I'm hoping that somebody here might know of a low-level viewer that might
open these files by "brute force".  I suspect that they mught be damaged
(obviously), but I'd much rather have a truncated file or one missing a
channel or two than the alternative: nothing at all.

Thanks!