Anonymous User asked: I am not one for unsolicited advice and I apologize if you already know all of this, but I believe this advice needs to be acted on as soon as possible for it to maybe work so I'm erring on the side of immediacy:
You need to disconnect the drive right away to minimize the chance of anything accidentally being overwritten. Depending on how GRUB blew up your drive, the data might still all be there.
If the drive itself isn't damaged, the data recovery job can be much much quicker and cheaper than the super-expensive data recovery prices you hear about for damaged drives. But, it's important to minimize any further data being written to the drive, lest it be covering up something important.
i luckily had others talking me through it already but i really appreciate you reaching out to say this!
i don't have a hard drive big enough to hold an image of a 1TB drive, and even if i did i think the NTFS filesystem itself is unrecoverable, but as long as my PNGs are safe in this mess somewhere i'm really happy that i was convinced not to give up hope.