Hard drive disaster recovery software?

Hi guys. I had a hard drive fail Sunday (confirmed dead by WD's diagnostic software, and RMA'd replacement already set up). Most all critical data was backed up to CDs, so it's nothing crippling. But I've got about 30 gigs of old time radio shows that will take a while to find in the newsgroups and re-download.

I've tried PC Inspector, which is good at recovering files, but it doesn't even see the dead partition (nothing else does either), although the secondary partition on the drive is still accessable.

Is there any other free or cheap recovery software that would be worth trying on a physically failed drive? May as well try recovery while I'm waiting for the new drive to show up.

 

Yeah, the most useful data recovery services and software are definitely not free, but I may as well give the freebies a try. As I said, my critical data is all safe, but I don't really want to spend any serious money to recover free downloads.

Already checked out Virtual Labs. Their download is free, but actual recovery would cost ~250 bucks for 30 gigs, assuming they could salvage it.

Thanks for any suggestions.