F: drive inaccessable

Rexmism,
If you don't have any files on disk that you can't afford to lose, you may attempt re-formatting the drive as a first option. Sounds simple but it might work.

I highly doubt that will work. I suspect that the drive is failing. Run the WD Lifeguard diagnostic tools from here: WD Support / Downloads / SATA & SAS / WD VelociRaptor

I really don't want to lose the files, but am starting to lose hope. I downloaded the Lifeguard tool. The SMART status shows as fail. When I run the quick test, it runs for about 9 seconds then says:

Quick Test on drive 2 did not complete!
Status code = 04 (Unknown failed test element), Failure Checkpoint = 64 (SMART Attribute Test)

I'm trying the extended test. I suspect it will take a while and also suspect it's not looking good. Are there any sort of tools for recovering anything at all, or is everything gone?

If the quick test fails, there's usually no need to run the extended test.

There are some recovery tools that you can get. The paid ones are usually better than the free ones. I use GetDataBack in my business to do this. The trial version will tell you if and what it can recover. To do the actual recovery, you will need to pay. I have had some success on drives that failed SMART with it.

How important is this data? The more you do to the drive now, the harder it will be to get the data. If it's vital to a business or such, there are paid services to recover your data. They are very expensive though.

I second what Daifne has said GetDataBack NTFS has worked really well for me too on failed drives. I don't think any of the free ones will work if the drive reports as failed.

The data on the drive isn't vital, but personal things I would be sad to lose. Fortunately all the pictures are backed up on an external drive. Of course, now I want to back them up on something else.
The extended test failed as well, the chdsk is STILL running. It finished with the bad segments and is now saying things occasionally like
Correcting error in index $I30 for file 9558
Sorting index $I30 in file 9558

Not sure if this is a good thing or if, like Daifne mentioned, doing things might make it worse.

It's a coin toss. You may get lucky and be able to access the drive at least long enough to copy the data, or it could make things worse.

Just to update, chkdsk is STILL running. Six days now and going strong. It's on step 4 and every several hours will say it has fixed a bad sector. Step 4 started at file 7000-something and is up to file 8000-something. Given that a previous step said something about files in the 40,000's, I'm starting to wonder how many days, weeks, months this thing may run. Is this ridiculous or what?

It's ridiculous. ;-)

With the fixing of bad sectors, you are probably losing some files, at least.

There was no point in chkdsk running past a few hours.
The drive is just a lump of trash now. Any hope of data recovery is lost with clusters being marked as bad by chkdks.

Okay, I give up. I tried GetDataBack and it found pretty much nothing. I'm not sure why chkdsk is able to know the names of some files, but I don't think there's much left. Thanks for your help, everyone.