Good Hard Drive Recovery Program

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

What is a good hard drive recovery tool for the Mac? My problem is that my iMac SBOD'ed on me so I had to hold the power button and shut it off. However, when I turned it back on. The Apple logo would go staticky and then it wouldn't boot into Mac OS X. Instead it booted into a black screen that looks like a terminal window. Any solutions? I have no backups (I was about to begin taking the data off to install Leopard onto it) and I really need the data thats on it.

I've tried Disk Warrior so I know the files are there. I just can't copy them over or rebuild the directory. Whenever I try rebuilding the directory, it says that I don't have enough room. The drive is a 250GB drive and has 7GB left of storage.

I've also used the Disk Utility on the OS install disc and it says that there's a catalog error.

Anyways, any help would be appreciated and I am pretty much up for anything. Thanks in advance for the help.

 

[Stiganator]

Use another hard drive and back it up to that.

 

[sourceninja]

that was my thought, I think linux can mount hfs partitions. So use a linux live cd, a usb hard drive and mount the system drive and copy over what you want.

 

[timswim78]

I have used R-Studio on NTFS and FAT32 partitions, and it has been outstanding! They now support HFS and HFS+ file systems. It costs money, but it worked well for me, recovering 2,997 out of 3,114 files the last time I used it.
http://www.data-recovery-software.net/

The only caveat is that you will have to run the software from a Windows machine.

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

Even if the hard drive's catalog file is messed up Linux should still be able to see it?

 

[sourceninja]

The answer there is 'maybe'.