I've had good luck with WinHex ( I bought the Forensic flavor ).
I think they have a free (possibly cripppled) demo, so you could evaluate whether it will work for your situation.
Depending on what caused the drive to crash, you may not be able to recover it with only software. For example, the old IBM DeskStar (DeathStar) and the ever-famous "Click of Death" ... if the logic board has failed, then software will not be able to accurately read the information off of the platters: Your only option at that point is to get a similar drive and swap in the new logic board.
IF it is mearly a data/formatting problem, you can make a quickie backup using "dd" (disk dump) ... available in Knoppix "Linux-on-a-CD" it will make a raw image that you can sort through with other applications.
If you *do* get WinHex (or similar application) DON'T DO ANYTHING until you make a bit-perfect copy (verifiable with an MD5 hash) to an image. Most applications of this type can operate on the image as if it were a physical drive ... hence, saving your drive as a master copy (also preserves the evidence value in court) ... ALWAYS (as possible) work on an image ... make a couple copies in case you screw one up .... NEVER work on the only copy (i.e., the original trashed drive) of your valuable data ... screw up once, and it's a goner with no practical hope of recovery.
If the program can't make a reasonable backup, chances are you have a hardware logic problem .. try it on another machine, if that doesn't work, swap in a new logic boad to the drive and try again.
There was also a company with a product {something} Commander I think ... I don't remember, and since they pimped me out of a few hundred dollars, I'm not inclined to recommend them. They're fairly popular with Enterprise customers and are rumored to have decent success at soft-error data recovery ... I don't know that for sure, since the copy I licensed completely failed and their support was all but completely worthless.
Good Luck
Scott