I was wondering if there is such a thing.

I have downloaded a handfull and each will find the files but I need to pay anything from $25 to $99 for the workable product.

I formatted the hard drive that had my backups on and had not bothered to copy over a not very important folder with some word files.

It would be nice to get them back but its not the end of the world.

Has anyone come across something,

Even something like spybot where you can donate a little.

Thanks

Try this freebie:
http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/download.htm

I have tried that, It finds nothing, I think that it does not support NTFS.

The others found the files but I had to pay for a licence before it would work.

I understand that companies dont write and distribute software for fun, but thought like most things there was a cheaper way for a one off.

You can use any disk editor to search clusters for .doc file headers.. It's not pretty but it works.

Linux provides all the tools you need for such low level work. If it's only a couple of documents and the drive wasn't badly fragmented then you have a good chance of getting some of the data back.

I have used dd and grep to restore ARJ archives from a bust partition. Got em all

Well thanks for the tips.

I realised that I had not saved some more important stuff so I purchased a single user licence for PC Inspector File recovery and It worked really well, found every file and recovered them into folders ready to re-arrange.

Thanks

for a fairly comprehensive list fo freeware tools and utilities look here.

http://www.dirk-loss.de/win-tools.htm