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I had my primary HD fail on me last year and, after purchasing a new HD for my system, I installed the failed HD as a secondary drive. I purchased a program called File Scavenger, for (approx) $50.00(US) and was able to recover the majority of the data from the failed drive. It was DEFINITELY worth the money.
If I remember correctly, it's primary function isn't to recover OS-related files, or those needed to run your previously installed programs... It will simply look to recover whatever valid files it can find. It did find DOC/XLS/PDF/JPG/MPG/AVI/BMP/WMP/EXE/INI...etc. It may not have recovered all non-system program files, but it did recover most of the files needed to re-install the applications I lost (self-extracting installation files).
It had an option to keep data being recovered in its original folder(s) if possible, but outside of that option, it was hardly an "organized" recovery process. It basically created one big folder of files, which took me more than a week to sort through and clean up.... but I wasn't complaining... trust me. To date, I can't think of any documents/files that I lost from that failure... and I guess if I can't think of one, I didn't need it anyway.
The manufacturer is Quetek(.com) and they have a newer version out for Windows(2000/XP/etc) which works with all types of drives (internal/external/flash/etc) You might want to give it a try before tossing out your drive. Personally, it's a good thing to have in your software library anyways....
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