Tools for a sick Hard-drive

Knocking on wood here as I have not had any major hard-drive issues in several years but they always seem to crop up at the worst possible moment. I remember a hard-drive going bad several hours before I was headed out the door for a 10 day trip overseas. I had no choice but to let the drive die a graceful death. The server the drive was in at the time was serving about a 100,000 hits a day. I was quite devastated having the server offline that long but sometimes shit happens. I did some heavy investing in a new server and have redundant drives now on critical services. But there will come a time when you will need to recover some data. Seems #1/usr/bin/geek had some major trouble with a drive and was able to recover his data with a software package I have never heard of. Read on. [#1/usr/bin/geek]