Update from Ady on Facebook:
It's now 12:02 am 2nd april here now and i can now tell you all.................It isn't a joke. this has really happened. I'm going to go out and get a new 3TB drive tomorrow and i will try all the suggestions to try and get this other drive at least working enough to recover the data from it. The drive is still under guarantee but i will lose all my data if i send it back, so i want to exhaust all options first.