Data Rescue Classic - 4.3.0

Rescue via the link ProSoft Engineering provided and accessed it with the serial number they emailed me. I was blown away by the power of that application. I had a "dead" IBM Deskstar 61 GB HD with about 59 GB of information on it - much of which was sound and photo files. (Many of the photo files were taken with a digital camera and downloaded to my hard drive). The HD had not been backed up in a long time - I hope I've learned my lesson - so I was in a bit of a panic. I tried replacing the circuit board with another identical HD; I tried Disk Warrior; I tried Anubis Utility; I tried VST SoftRaid (the driver loaded on the HD); I tried several shareware "volume mounters," and - of course - Mac OS Drive Setup. The best I could do was get some of those applications to recognize that the HD at least existed, but in each of those cases (Drive Setup, SoftRaid, Anubis Utility) the applications informed me I needed to initialize the HD. One of the volume mounters called Mount Everything at least identified bad sectors, although it couldn't do anything with them. Anubis tried to help, but couldn't "read the driver descriptor at block 0" - whatever that means. Anubis also tried to scan the HD and move bad sectors, but kept locking up. Disk Warrior is great for rebuilding and optimizing a working HD, but didn't even recognize my "dead" one. I was resolved to accepting the fact that I was going to lose the files because I didn't want to spend several hundred dollars by sending it off to have the stuff extracted. Then I discovered Disk Rescue. What a deal! The program was so user friendly I didn't even have to read any instructions before putting it to work. It took a while - 59 GB of info is a lot to extract - but it found EVERYTHING!