A time ago i was asked to take a look at a not more working PC, there were some hardware issues, and so i began to make a backup on the internal second harddrive.
Guess what happened... The second drive was corrupted, seems that there is a serious problem with the IDE Controller. So what now, two harddrives, two corrupted, backup corrupted (worst case). So i began to look for reocvery software. I googled a bit and there are several products out there, all of them have a "free" trial version, if you want to restore something they tell you, that you have to buy it. To pay for that software would be ok for me, but to pay and not to know if the data could be recovered is not something i like.
Until i came across TestDisk, a program from Christophe Grenier  it is released under GPL, and so i gave it a try.
It has a simple DOS-like interface, and did the recovery out of the box without any problems. That's the way software should work!
Dont forget to donate to Christophe!