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