Question : Problem: Best recommended software for recovery of data on hard drives

I'm looking for advice on recent best experiences, and suggestions for - SOFTWARE to recover data from hard drives, especially in extreme cases (those doomsday scenarios such as viruses on drives, drives not booting, accidental formatting of drives, etc.  - you get the picture!).  Preferably, it would be great to find one that handles both FAT32 and NTFS drives, rather than buying two separate packages, if at all possible. If not, well, I'll take what may be suggested, even if it means doing just that.

There's a cool list of software suggested in an answer on the EE, but that was given back in 2003, and there are surely new recommendations out there.   For starters, I found this link - http://data-recovery-software-review.toptenreviews.com/ - which has some possibilities.

Does anyone have any additional ideas from their own experience, or knowledge?  Thanks!

Answer : Problem: Best recommended software for recovery of data on hard drives

The two best utilities I've found for data recovery are GetDataBack and Easy Recovery Pro.

GetDataBack doesn't meet your "one product for both FAT & NTFS" wish ... but it's an excellent product nevertheless, and worth having for both file systems.
http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm

Easy Recovery Pro is very expensive, but there's a "Lite" version that allows you to recover up to 25 files per session --> so for infrequent recoveries of a relatively limited # of files you can simply run it several times to recovery the data.   http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/file-recovery-software/

Easy Recovery is slightly more error-tolerant than GetDataBack;  but both are excellent  -- in most cases they will both recover essentially the same set of files (I've seen minor differences ... but neither is "better" than the other -- just different).

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If the issue isn't so much failed data, but just a lost partition (inadvertently deleted, fdisk'd, etc.) then Active Partition Recovery works very well for these -- just a few seconds and it's completely restored.  http://www.partition-recovery.com/

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Finally, this isn't a "recovery" package ... but when a disk is having problems with failing sectors, Spinrite is the premier utility to attempt to recover the data on the failed sectors => it does a detailed statistical analysis of every bad sector and can often "magically" recover the sector data.   It's also a good "preventative" utility --> it rewrites every sector on your disk, so there's no magnetic degradation of very-infrequently-accessed data;  and it can let you know when a disk is developing problems.   Not inexpensive ... but a very good tool for you PC "toolbox".   And an excellent utility to run BEFORE using the data recovery tools I noted above -- it may render some sectors readable that otherwise would not have been.  
http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm