Exernal HD partition error - photos 'lost'!!

My 4 month old Seagate 250Gb external HD has started dislpaying "$Mft error", which according to Seagte technical support indicates a corrupted partion (whatever that means!). They recommended using File Recovery for Windows which is one of these 'free scan to see if it will recover the data- but £60 for the full version which will actually recover the data!!!!! I ran the free scan and surely enough the data can potentially be recovered, but I'm not keen on forking out £60 for a program I'll hopefully have to use only once. I tried a couple of free data recovery programs but they could not see any of the data on the HD like FR for Windows could. The HD has photos (which are stored to a free basic Flickr account- so maybe best to upgrade to gain full access to all the photos??), and my CD's (which obviously I'm not too bothered about).
Will formatting the HD solve the partition corruption? How do you avoid this type of problem?!? (Heat??).

Am running a Dell 5150 on XP, diskmgmt.msc says the HD's are all healthy!
Thanks in advance.

 

try one of these programs. they are the full version, all they ask is a donation, if it helped. anyway, if you get your stuff back, i'd try formatting the external h/d. do you leave it on all the time? i only hook up my external h/d's when i need to use them. anyway, g/l - sos

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=5040 <-- PC INSPECTOR smart recovery 4.5

http://www.pcinspector.de/Sites/file_recovery/info.htm?language=1 <-- PC INSPECTOR™ File Recovery 4.x

 

OnTrack makes Easy Recovery Pro and I've used it in the past to save data from crashed partitions. http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/file-recovery-software/ The price is about the same and they also have the free 'trial'. Check the Data Recovery section here at Major Geeks. There are many free programs available that just might work, in addition to the link to PCInspector provided above.
Major Geeks Data Recovery http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads38.html

DO NOT format the partition!!! This will absolutely make your data unrecoverable!!! Formatting will NOT help this situation. It will make the drive able to be used safely, and will probably fix the corrupt partition, but it does this by erasing the entire contents of the drive, including any files and file system that may be present. Corrupt data is better than no data when it comes to recovery.