I recently went through this with some of my drives. I went to http://www.ntfs.com where they have demos of their programs. The good thing about it was I was able to see my data was still on my drive. Then I decided to buy one of their programs, and after much trying with the full version, I still couldn't get my data. I could still see it was there, but couldn't get at it. Fired up Partition Magic and had everything back in 5 minutes. So in my situation, I just wasted $30 on a program that did nothing. But they do have free tools so you can verify your data is on your drive.

Edit: Looking back I see you never mentioned what kind of system you are trying to recover data to. Mine was using Win XP