I've got a corrupted linux sata hard drive and I wondered if there was any good linux-based software that could recover the data on the drive. I tried testdisk and fsck but had no joy. I also booted from a knoppix 7 data recovery cd but didn't have any joy with that either. There's tons of stuff around for recovery of windows fat and ntfs drives but I haven't found anything effective for an ext3 drive. Thanks for any pointers.

I've used photorec with good success in the past, however being part of the testdisk suite I don't know if it will help you (since you said testdisk didn't help).

Photorec can work independent from filesystems, so you should be able to recover your files (if they are recoverable) with it.

thanks for the responses. I'm trying photorec now, the program is telling me 4 hours to completion so it's wait and see. It's not easy to use, I went round in circles till I realised I was doing it wrong. If photorec doesn't work I'll try ddrescue on the systemrescuecd.

update: photorec didn't work, it kept giving the error that there was insufficient space on the target drive when in fact there was 300Gb of empty space on it. I couldn't be bothered getting bogged down with that however ddrescue did work (off the systemrescucd), it cloned the broken drive to another good drive and I was able to get all my data back.