There's usually three software I give a shot to when I come accross a such situation :
- Recuva by Piriform;
- EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard by EaseUS;
- GetDataBackNTFS;
Recuva is so/so. It works well sometimes, but sometimes it can also recover a single file on a whole HDD that hasn't been formatted, so it's really situation-specific.
EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard recovers a lot of data when you use it, however the free version only allows you to recover max 1GBs of file. Also, I had a situation last week where I used it to recover data on a crashed HDD and it retrieved 150GBs of data (on a 320GBs HDD, impressive no ?) However, most of these files were videos, multimedia files. And the person whose HDD belongs too said that he doesn't recall having any media file on that HDD or even used that much media files on there. So the question is : were these files really present on the HDD, or was it just a fake to convince us to buy the product to recover the files ?
GetDataBackNTFS is one of the best in my opinion. It managed to recover hundreds of files on a HDD that was totally inaccessible and that had been dropped from a few feet high on the ground. That's really impressive if you ask me. Also, if you Google "GetDataBackNTFS Portable", you'll have the paid version of GetDataBackNTFS in a portable application, without having to activate it or buy it. It's just creat.