hosed HDD

MBR and partition tables were broken in so many pieces, lots of bad sectors it seems, SMART status is LOL BAD
i've tried a few utils to re-scan the drive and rebuild the filesystem, most recently iRecover, which got to 72% over 13 hours and then the drive lost power; currently I'm running testdisk 6.1 but it seems iffy on recreating the filesystem.
All i really need is the first partition of ~30GB, thats where the essential data is.  Does /comp/ know of any programs that have given good results?

clarification, wondows reports the drive as RAW and unformatted, most of the utilities i've used seem to at least see that it is NTFS but are unable to rebuild it to be browsable

I like Legato NetWorker, but it's pretty expensive.

Just restore your backups. You do have backups, don't you?

none existed, wasnt even my drive.

I've used EasyRecovery Professional and hdd regenerator <--(from the hiren's boot cd) with pretty good results.

Use TestDisk. It's the standard.