Resolved Need to recover data from an external hard drive

I recovered some data from a laptop for them when the drive was failing a month or so ago. Now one of the guys there sent me an external hard drive asking me to do it again. My machine detects it and determines the size correctly but none of the programs I have tried has been able to get anything from the drive, I have tried all the suggestions I have seen on the posts here.
I think what I need is a program like one I used years ago. I can't remember the name of it though Does anyone know of a freeware program that will maybe run from a command prompt that will ignore the partition information and rebuild the directory structure and just copy what it finds? I kind of know what I want it to do but haven't been able to find it yet.

TIA

 

Have a look here:http://www.filehippo.com/search?q=recover+info+from+HD
Recuva is a good program I believe to do what you want. Cheers Neil.

 

I tried Recuva but didn't have any real luck with it. I did find a couple of programs that the trial seemed to do what I needed but I won't buy it. It will be up to the guy that needs the data to purchase it if he is serious enough about the data. Plus I'll need to recover data onto another external hard drive.
Thanks for the suggestion. I know what needs to be done so I will mark this thread as closed.