Had a notebook go to crap on me last week.. refused to boot, refused to be seen when mounted as a USB external drive.. Figured all the data was lost. But a friend on IRC pounted me to Trinity Rescue Kit (http://trinityhome.org/trk/) to try. So I did and damned if it didn't work and I could see the HD contents so I was able to dump the data onto my thumb drive.
Though I couldn't fix the bad sectors on the drive (unless I was doing that wrong) I was able to at least recover data.
Then I spent a fun saturday formatting, fdisking, scandisking and reinstalling and got the notebook back to working order.
That concludes today's infomercial 