hotmog wrote:I used it successfully to recover photographs from an old hard drive that had crashed, corrupting the file system.
That's not the same thing though... If the file allocation table or directory trees become corrupted, the data is still physically there, the only thing missing is the index pointing to it. Even formatting a hard disk does not wipe the old data*, it just creates a new, empty, allocation table. At this point recovery is trivial.
The problem comes when you install a new operating system onto the same disk. Chances are you'll overwrite sections of the old data and make recovery extremely difficult. In that situation, free recovery software lies somewhere between mostly and entirely useless.
*Before anyone pipes up, it doesn't matter if you do a quick or a full format. A full format just runs a sector check, it still doesn't wipe. 
