Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.
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.

Recuva is great for accidentally deleted files, but unfortunately I haven't seen it do much of anything else.
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Matt