Ever have a hard drive crash -- I mean really crash, so hard that none of the usual disk utilities can recover your data? This can happen if your partition table or file alllocation table (the famous FAT) has been damaged.  I used to think that a situation like this was beyond repair, but a German firm has developed a program to recover exactly this sort of data.  It's called Tiramisu, apparently named after some sort of delicacy that I'm not all that familiar with, but to me it could just as well be called "Miracle."
   Tiramisu's secret is that it doesn't depend on the partition table or even the FAT; it instead is actually able to scan the drive, find files on it and create a new partition table and FAT that it holds in memory. Once it finishes scanning you can copy any or all files from the bad drive to another drive, either one connected in the same system or across a cable connection such as Microsoft's Interlink. Tiramisu does not write anything to the drive being recovered, removing the risk that trying to write a new FAT might damage other data. Tiramisu will work on any normal hard disk, including large EIDE drives that use logical block addressing (and SCSI drives); it runs in DOS, and needs to have expanded memory (which can be provided by EMM386.EXE). If you're recovering data from a Windows 95 system you'll get the files but lose any long file names; also, Tiramisu isn't compatible with the FAT32 option available in OEM Service Release 2.  (If you use Interlink to transfer files to another computer that system must have at least one partition that doesn't use FAT32, since INTERSVR.EXE won't work with FAT32 either.)
   I tried it on a drive that had some major problems -- so bad that the system took forever just to boot from a floppy disk! -- and Tiramisu was able to recover almost everything on the drive, only missing a few files that had developed damaged sectors. The process did take almost two hours (for a 1 Gb drive), but that's not unreasonable.
   The price of the program isn't unreasonable either, if you have a goodly amount of valuable information that you need to recover.  The DOS version is available with a seven-day license (to let you recover from one disaster) for about $95; a full license costs $190. Plug 'n Play also offers versions of Tiramisu that work with NTFS and on Novell Netware servers.

Link to Plug 'n Play's web site