Through a massive cock-up with Partition Magic my main NTFS partition was rendered unbootable. Thinking only the partition table was screwed I attempted to repair it using the linux fdisk program booted using the tomsrtbt disk (something I've done several times before with no ill-effects.) but somewhere in doing that I rendered the partition unreadable as well as unbootable. Through the use of some limited freeware versions of disk recovery tools, most notably Winternals Disk Commander, I've established that my data is probably OK but since all the tools I've tried are limited to reading-only, requiring payment before the advanced recovery features become available, I have no way of recovering it. My question is, does anyone know of any good free (ie: unlimited) software that I can use to get the partition back long enough to transfer my data off it so I can reformat?

Try booting off the XP CD and choosing the recovery console instead of setup. You should get full read/write access that way. I know it's saved my butt a few times.

The recovery console won't work on what is effectively a blank hard disk will it?

nope

That's what I thought. What I'm after is a good free partition recovery tool. I've found plenty of commercial ones, such as the aforementioned Disk Commander from WinTernals, but no free ones.

Not sure if this will help. Read about this one but have not used it: http://www.partition-recovery.com/ . It is shareware so I don't know its total functionality. I bought this one: http://www.oosoft.de/english/products/index.html which is the BlueCon v.4 . O&O usually gives you a fully operational program as a free download. Later if you purchase it, they give you the registry key that will unlock "extra" items.

The Demo version of Partition Recovery couldn't even find the partition I wanted recovered so the full version isn't likely to do any good. As for BlueCon, I'm not sure... It didn't appear to have any partition recovery stuff but perhaps I'm not looking hard enough...

So far, the only program that appears to have any chance af actually recovering the partition is Winternals Disk Commander but you have to pay for that...