Recommend a Data Recovery Program
 

Ok, so a friend of mine got his laptop serviced by Best Buy (foolish move, I know), so now they fixed his heating problem, but in return for that, they decided to completely format his hard drive. I swear, hard drive formats are standard procedure at Best Buy for ANY AND ALL PROBLEMS.
So anyways, he has some important information on his computer that he did not back up, becuase he was not informed by them that they would do such a thing.
Now, I feel sorry for his predicament, and I would like to be able to help him out.

Does anyone know of any particularly effective unformat programs?
Especially ones which are available via torrents.

I know of Stellar Phoenix, but I think that is a relatively old program, and I can't find any working torrents for it.

Thank you so much to anyone who can help.

R-Studio was the recovery tool that helped me restoring some deleted files from an ntfs volume. It allows scanning of a particular area of the harddrive and finds fat16, fat32, ntfs, ext3 and iirc some more filesystems.

The ultimate combo for data recovery is TestDisk and Ontrack's EasyRecovery Pro.

this one always worked for me, however its not free
http://www.runtime.org/

Oh, thanks guys for all of your suggestions.
I decided to go with Active@ 7.1 for all of my file-recovery needs (since it was the only torrent for such a program that I could find :().

This immediate issue is solved, but maybe this thread can still stay open for some discussion about these programs? Moderator, its your call.