Data recovery help request

[scott-DPNOqEs/LNQ at public.gmane.org (Scott Ehrlich)]

A family member's hard drive has started to fail.   I connected it to my 
Windows box and Windows claimed it was a new drive and wanted to reformat 
it.  I said no.

I then connected to my Linux box and it saw 4 partitions - two "unknown", 
one Novell, and one NTFS.

I used dd to try and preserve the partitions; one of the unknowns was 
fine, the other gave me a disk i/o error immediately and stopped; the ntfs 
one got much of the way through but also gave a disk i/o error.   I didn't 
bother with the tiny Novell one.

With all of this, is there a better way to try and recover the data?  My 
next step is to use strings to try and recover whatever data I can.  Is 
there any tool and/or method I can use to try and preserve the existing 
data as though it came back from a data recovery shop, without having to 
spend much money?  The drive is still pretty good, so I can always redo 
the data retrieval.

The goal is data retrieval with little or no cost.

I'll be happy to consider Linux, Mac, and Windows options.

Thanks.

Scott

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