Harddisk recovery solution

After all the OS problems I had, it came to partition issues as well. Somehow, my external drive, formatted as two 500 GB NTFS drives, got into trouble. Originally, the drive was formatted using the disk utility in MacOSX as FAT32 and then to NTFS in Win XP. Then I couldn't mount it in Leopard, so I decided to fix NTFS under Win; that didn't help at all in terms of Mac OS mounting but the drive worked like a charm in XP. However, when I decided to reinstall everything I saved all my files on this drive, and after I got back my OS (both Mac and Win) the problems got worse: now I couldn't read the files I saved; the previous data on the drive was fine. Strange. So I had to search and try a lot of the :recovery software: out there. Hands down, GetData Back was the best of the crop: easy to use, fast to read my 500 GB partition and fast to extract the files. Now, of course, my files were in great shape, and the HDD problem was minor, so I cannot advise on how good this program performs when dealing with severe data loss, but according to some online reviews, it still prevails from the myriad of recovery solutions.