Need a disk recovery vendor

[Victor Odhner]

I already posted this on aztechlist and am working some
of the referrals, but I wanted to see if anyone has a
Linux slant on the problem.

A friend's year-old laptop seems to have lost its hard
drive.  It started with failing to boot, but we could view
the NTFS directories when running under SystemRescueCD.
Very quickly it degenerated, and now any operation seems
to produce errors, so at least the directories or
allocation tables must be trashed.  Or maybe he just lost
the electronics or seek controls.

I don't know how to tell if a disk has crashed.

He has a lot of family pictures on there, and is thinking of
looking for someone to try to recover the disk for him.
A partial recovery would be better than none, because
each individual image file stands alone.

He got the PC at Comp USA and might go there, but I
sort of doubt this is something they do.  We have a Data
Doctors on the corner and I think recoveries are part of
their business.

The budget is fairly limited but may be enough.  Any
recommendations or recent experiences with recovery
services would be greatly appreciated.

Answers I've already received:

The main recommendation has been for a product called
EasyRecovery Professional from OnTrack.com, which goes
for $499.  If someone has a copy of this and would be
willing to run a recovery for me, it could be worth
some money ... I want to keep it above board so I'm not
looking for a free copy of that program.

BootMaster Pro is $99.95 on a try-before-buy basis, but
may not address the kind of problem we're looking at.
Lost and Found from Symantec seems to be no longer
available.

Thanks,

Vic