Some mysterious hard drive burp just whacked one of my hard drives and while a program called "Binary Biz/Virtual Lab Data Recovery" was able to see the NTFS files in Windows, PC Inspector File Recovery (in Windows) could see nothing but "cluster.htm" and all that garbled crap. It's far from garbled in Virtual Lab Data Recovery, though.

Virtual Lab Data Recovery requires a $300+ payment and online login to be able to recover those files. No program I have found can see the ext3 directory.

Is there a program in Linux that will help me get these files and fire them over to another drive? Thanks!

I would've liked a slightly more precise description of whacking; did it destroy the partition table? Did it destroy some in-filesystem metadata? Did it destroy only in-file data?

For partition recovery, I recommend testdisk and/or gpart. For file recovery, `foremost' sounds like it DTRT.

It whacked the partition table, it seems. I'm not sure what it did. The file names can be found with at least one Windoze program that requires $$$ to recover things, so I am assuming the partition table that got eaten but nothing else.

'foremost'? Is there a link to that?

Indeed there is foremost

Good luck with it