any of the free recovery software any use?

yes yes I know back up and all that.

Some manufacturers used to do the software on their sites.

Try this:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Used it on a neighbours dead hard drive, got what he needed off it.

or from the folks that brought you CCleaner there is:

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

I used the piriform one a few weeks back, got pretty much everything back as far as I'm aware.

I've got best experiences with the Advanced File Recovery software, most of the time I was able to recover data from formatted PC.

http://Www.recovermyfiles.com worked for me when 3 HDDs all corrupted in the space of 6 months a couple of years ago.

You can download the program and run it for free, then buy it if it finds stuff for you.

Good luck!

Aren't those tools all for recovering deleted files though?

If the hardware is at fault, use hdclone to image the drive onto another drive before you do anything else. It'll even image onto an external USB hard disk too.

Then you can run whatever tools on the copy without worrying about making the fault worse.