Originally Posted By: jmwking
Are there any other reliable, reasonably user friendly (or very well documented) free tools I should look at?
The free data recovery tool recuva saved my bacon one time, but I don't know that it is meant to work with physically damaged hard drives. I think it is more for recovering deleted data from healthy drives. But, you might give it a try.

tanstaafl.
_________________________
"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"