We have used R-Studio multiple times to recover data from hard disks. We mount the disk in another machine, and extract the data to another hard drive.

All of disk failures we have seen resulted from a damaged or corrupted FAT table, and have had the good luck to have always recovered all of the "lost" data.

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Once, my Father's disk crashed, and we were working to recover it. He originally had a few megabytes of word documents and some scanned pictures. Much to our surprise, we found 100s of gigabytes of Indian music and porn.

Investigating further, we also discovered massive amounts of personal data belonging to someone in Houston, including stock accounts, financial passwords, tax returns, and immigration forms.

It appears that the disk drive had been used, then the files were deleted, and returned to the "Best Buy" electronic store. They in turn had re-packaged it, and sold it to my father. (I wonder if that is why it crashed.) Then I recovered the original data.

I should note that it is quite disruptive to introduce a large amount of porn by surprise into an engineering environment. Word spreads fast.

The moral is: be careful with your old disk drives.