Harddrive issue- is it safe to reformat and then recover?

[Oaktech]

My options at the moment would be, in this order Gparted live cd to try and recover the MFT, then reclaime As long as the drive mounts in windows reclaime will recover the raw files from it. This exactly what has happened to our WD mybook, and reclaime was the only thing we could find that would get it back.

[tech_guy]

One program I have used in the past and it's worked where other programs haven't on foobarred drives, is Active@ File Recovery from LSoft Technologies. It costs but it's a small price to pay if it gets your data back.