Bernie

I have all the most important data backed up. But I have a huge number
of downloads (utilities and lots of other stuff) that would take a long
time to replace. It is worth it to me to spend some hours and even some
money not to have to replace those things. So...

I had four partitions; XP, Vista, Linux and a Linux swap. The XP
partition is the important one.

So I can see there are sites promising partition recovery software for a
fee. I don't mind a smallish fee but I want to know what works and what
doesn't first.

So anyone out there good at data recovery?

More data: I have another drive in the machine with a lot of free space
but it is also my data drive. It is okay but doesn't have an O/S on it.

There isn't a working O/S on the main drive and it is the main drive
that I want to recover. So the ideal solution is something that can
work from a bootable CD.