How To Recover Files From Hard Disk Crash

almost computers hard-disk crashed nowdays without any warning. The S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics showed perfect health all along. One of the 128 GB partition of a newly purchased Barracuda drive is not showing any files. In fact whenever I click on it Windows 2000 it is asking me if I want to format it. Even the NTFS is not being recognized.

we tried to recover the files using a freeware tool. The file names shows but the recovered file doesn't contain any data.

I would very much appreciate any tools / utilities you can point me to which will help me recover some critical files from the hard-disk crash.

For the next time… there will be no next time. I am purchasing 8 computers to backup everything - 2 for internet connectivity (with hot backup), 2 for file server (RAID 1), 2 for database server (hot backup) and 1 additional for QA and 1 for order processing. As I said there will be no next time :) But this time, I would very much appreciate any guidance.