Looking for free recovery software

[FuturePro]

Last night my hard drive crashed due to power surge not able to boot. I have about 40 GB of data, some very important one my collage project. I searched for data recovery software over google come to know about some software. I even downloaded the demo version of Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Software. It is able to see the data but it doesn't allow me to save it. Whenever I tried to save it says to get the full version. The software cost $99. I can't afford, I am a student and looking for some free stuff.

Can any one help me out.

Thanks in Advance.

[hobbes]

I have come across full trial versions for some recovery software in the past, you may want to keep searching around. If you're a student though, check with your school's IT person/group; they may be able to help.

[louyovin]

Last night my hard drive crashed due to power surge not able to boot. I have about 40 GB of data, some very important one my collage project. I searched for data recovery software over google come to know about some software. I even downloaded the demo version of Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Software. It is able to see the data but it doesn't allow me to save it. Whenever I tried to save it says to get the full version. The software cost $99. I can't afford, I am a student and looking for some free stuff.

Can any one help me out.

Thanks in Advance.
If you haven't already found something, you might want to have a look at ddrescue. It is a Linux program so you would have to run it from a LInux livecd like Knoppix. It is built on dd but tries to keep going if bad sectors are encountered. IIRC, it will even try to read the disk from back to front to get around unrecoverable errors. I have used it for making images but not with a bad drive. You might check out their web site: (http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html)

[Mandi]

If a drive will still spin up, I've always been able to recover data (copy to another known good hard drive) with good old free Knoppix live CD - even drives Windows swears up and down are nonexistent, bad, going to contaminate the atmosphere, or worse. Knoppix may have to force the mount, but it's enough to copy the data at least.