iPad 3 stuck in recovery after OTA update to iOS 7

I have an iPad 3 which i've been lovingly using sense I bought it in 2012, it was working beautifully until 2 days ago when I decided to update it to the newest ios. I had the little notification pop up on my screen to say there was an available update, after ignoring it for a few days I decided I might as well update it so I selected to do so. It took nearly 4 hours at our interent speed but it appeared to go through perfectly fine, it asked that I plug it into a power source before continuing as my battery life was just below 50% so I did and touched the install button to move forward. The installation seemed to be working as it should but all of sudden it rebooted its self and came up with the connect to iTunes icon, so I did and iTunes popped up imediately and informed me it had dected an iPad in recovery mode. After hours of looking for a solution that wouldn't cost me all my pictures I decided to just let it restore. However when it attempted this the first time it came up after an hour or so of downloading and said the network timed out and to try again. So I tried again 4-5 more times and each time it came back with a simular error. I followed the steps to try and correct this error but no joy. I tried it on both of my brothers computers with no luck and then plugged it into my iMac to try it yet again.

I decided if iTunes wasn't going to download it I would get myself and I found the newest ipsw available for my machine and downloaded it over night. This morning when trying to install this it came up saying my iPad wasn't elegiable for the requested build!! I followed the steps to edit the host file and remove the gs.apple string and flush my dns cache but still comes back saying it's not elegiable for the build.

I'm at my wits end here, it's been stuck in recovery mode for 3 days now, iTunes can't get past the preparing iPad for restore portion even if it manages to make it all the way through the download and it won't let me restore manually using the 7.0.6 ipsw I downloaded.

How do you fix this issue?? I just want to get my iPad restored and functioning again.