Hard Drive Recovery

I wouldn't trust that drive anyway. To me this sounds like IT returned the same drive to you, right?

Why did the filesystem became corrupted in the first place? I highly doubt they even checked that...

Filesystems don't become corrupted because of nothing - there has to be a cause. And if this cause is still there, it will fail on you again... and again.

So I advice to pester IT until you get a fresh drive. Write down the drive serial and don't stop bothering them until you get a different one. I find it very irresponsible that possibly broken hardware is just "zeroed" and returned back to the person which turned it in - especially since it's a harddrive and data is valuable...

Jam it back in, in the dark.

My professor would seriously kick some ass if our IT refused to do things. He needs a new system, he gets it. System gets broken, they fix it. It's just as simple as that.

And that's what IT is for. It's not hanging out in the IT team office and killing time with quake3....

I think something is going seriously wrong at your university Tritoch

EDIT: To give a good example of "kick some ass". There was this guy who thought he could slack and ignore some of his work. Complain got filed and the guy's contract didn't get renewed - plus an annotation to never ever again give him a job in the IT team.

There's nowhere I can't reach.