Sorry for your loss...My thoughts and prayers are with you :(
On a more serious note - Warranty? When my new internal Seagate (hmm are we seeing a trend here?) drive broke, I immediately sent it back to them hoping that they would accept my drive packed in an improvised foam box (bits cut from the foam that came with one of our TVs), as Seagate had stressed that you have to pack items in overly expensive foam designed specifically for drives -_-. Anyway, it reached them fine and I soon had a replacement landing carefully on my doorstep. Obviously, that doesn't solve the problem of your lost data, but just a thought
Good luck,
honda