Protect Partitions And Files From Damage?

My SSD with Windows 7 is O.K. - I can restore backup images.My Primary SamSung HDD is O.K. - I can restore backup images.My Secondary WDC HDD is what held my images and they vanished.Fortunately I have duplicates of most on an external HDD.I am currently scanning and attempting to recover from the Secondary HDD the few images that were not backed up.My WDC HDD was GPT which I have read is safer than MBR - but that did not work out well for me.I am thinking of cleaning it and using it as MBR,especially as Lost Partition Recovery is so much faster and easier on MBR than on GPT disks.If I use Windows Disk Management to make the WDC Disk "Offline" would that protect from a Linux glitch,or is it only Windows applications and tools that take any notice of Offline/Online settings ?Would the WDC be better protected if I refrain from allocating drive letters to the partitions on the WDC,and only access via the alternative Disk Management option "Mount in the following empty NTFS folder" ?

Windows always Recognises first the WDC HDC as Disc 0
and then the Samsung HDD as Disk 1
and finally the OCZ SSD as Disk 2 (even though it is connected to SATA port 0)

My Secondary WDC HDD was GPT with several partitions.I booted into a Linux Boot Flash Drive that I had slightly tweaked,and Linux aborted on start-up and the system restarted so I allowed a normal Windows 7 start-up.Windows Recognised the WDC HDD as Disk 0 BUT for some reason the GPT style Disc ID was a much shorter MBR style Disc ID.As usual the Samsung HDD was Disc 1, BUT IT WAS OFFLINE due to a Disk Signature Conflict.By Launching Macrium Reflect I saw that the WDC HDD was using the same 8 digit signature as the Samsung HDD.Windows Disk Management shows this WDC HDD as NOW being an MBR DISK with

100 MB Basic RAW Healthy(Active,Primary Partition)
25 GB Basic RAW Healthy(Primary Partition)
25 GB Unallocated
14 GB Free Space
531 GB Unallocated

MiniTool Power Data Recovery v 6.6 is able to perfectly recover 300 GB of files from the 531 GB Unallocated space,but two of the larger 6.5 GB files have the correct names and sizes but fail the MD5 checksum validation,so I know that some sparse damage has been done to a little bit of the information on the sectors.