On Fri, 2008-12-19 at 11:12 +0000, Mark Rogers wrote:
The BIOS can see the disk and correctly shows its manufacturer/serial/etc. I booted to an Ubuntu live CD and ran GParted, and it shows the disk as 18GB of unallocated space (which is the right capacity, although obviously I'd have prefered it to show an NTFS partition).
Try Photorec http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec it is probably in your favourite distro's package repository (on ubuntu and debian it is in the testdisk package)
It works very well even if the partition information etc is lost as it just looks for recognisable file headers.
If the disk is even slightly readable this has worked out quite well for me in the past, generally I find that if photorec can't do it then none of the commercial data recovery software will either and forensic style recovery might be the only option.
Oh and don't let the name fool you...it doesn't just do photos.