My 2 cents

I see that you have already reformatted but I wanted to say that GetDataBack works very well, at least for hd crashes. I used it a few years ago and managed to recover all my data from the crashed hd. One thing that was nice about it, was at the time you could download the s/w and run the program to determine if it could/would recover your files - if it did, then you had the option of purchasing the s/w, otw the recovery log(?) was deleted.