An acquaintance of mine had a hard drive corrupted. He took it to an expert who charged him £50 to tell him there was nothing that could be done. I had a look at it with a piece of software called photorec. All partition info & file names had gone, but the software recovered all the files ( as far as we could tell) but without names ( just the suffix, .jpg, .pdf etc.) It also found a lot of rubbish ( file starting blocks of deleted files) but he got back the files he wanted with a bit of searching.
Ian
