[BBLISA] Data recovery help request

[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