Any help appreciated as to what software I can download/buy/install to extract data from this drive or should I send it off to a specialist recovery company?

Laptop hard drive with windows 7 public beta installed. OS will only boot to system recovery. Error reported as "system volume on disk is corrupt". Can get to a command prompt but when I try to change drive to C: I get "cyclic redundency check error"

Removed HD from laptop and connected to 2nd PC. HD reported by bios and appears as drive D: in OS but is inaccessible and again reports "cyclic redundency check error".

Tried using Spinrite - waste of time.
Tried using unstoppable copier - couldn't access drive.

Any others I can try?

Oh and its a Seagate momentus 40Gb HDD (ST94811A)

First image the drive to another one before you work on it.

Second throw away your copy of spinrite so you aren't tempted to use it again in the future.

Then after you have imaged the drive, you can start using some software on the image, not the original drive.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Thanks for your response. Silly question time... What software can I use to image the drive and can I image it onto part of my existing c drive (the faulty drive is d:)?

If you have enough empty space on the other drive, sure. If you're comfortable with linux check out dd_rescue.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.