G'day Gary,
to recover trashed partition tables or deleted partitions, we find that the Norton tools work fairly well. On occasion we have had to resort to another tool called Active@ which we downloaded from the net for a modest fee. It's been very good.

We aren't in the game of trying to recover from overwritten partitions/disks. That's out of our league entirely, we don't own an electron microscope...

In general, deleted or damaged partition tables usually recover OK. A partition that's actually been overwritten is, for all practical purposes, gone.

Our primary requirement is to recover data from failing drives. For the most part we find Norton Ghost - with the correct parameters selected in order to do a sector copy - does this tolerably well. It's not uncommon to take a week on a really bad drive and still get everything although we also get drives that simply won't recover. (Dead is dead unless the platter is OK and you have clean room facilities etc..) Of course, we have systems sitting on the bench setup just for this task. Ghost is NOT installed on the PC, we boot from the Ghost CD and run the character based version - better options. Note that the very latest version no longer has this capability so when we start running into file systems that our current version doesn't understand we'll need to go looking for something else - probably something on a live CD I'd guess.

In the end, it depends what our customers are willing to pay for - time is money and some of these recovery processes take time (I.e. technician labour actually doin' stuff, not the above mentioned PC chugging away for a week or so). Those that can afford the really labour intensive recoveries don't need 'em - they do proper backups...

--=-- My credo: If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing - just ask my missus, she'll tell ya laugh --=--
You're only paranoid if you're wrong!