Unable to Access Harddrive

I'm pretty sure it is gone forever but i just want to make sure before i format the drive.

A friend of mine was using their computer when it all of a sudden restarted and it said OS missing. They promptly bought a new computer since it was an older computer anyway. the used carbonite to back up all of their data. Turns out carbonite didn't actually backup everything so they asked me if i could try and recover their data.

I popped the HDD into my computer to see if i could see anything. The HDD had the RAW file system running on it. I looked online and found a program, Testdisk might help. I ran the program and it wrote a new partition table for the disk. After a quick restart, the only thing on the drive is the 50MB partition that Dell put on there with the drivers for the computer, not the 230GB other part of the drive with the OS and everything.

Anyone know if there is a way to access that part of the drive? or how to recover that partition?

What type of information are you trying to recover? If it's just files then you could try using file recovery software. I use disk digger, its free and quite good.

The 230 GB shows up as unallocated. Will this still work?

EDIT2***

Woah posted in the wrong thread. Don't do what I just said if you read it...sorry about that.

ALWAYS the best thing to try first if you want data off is to burn a cd of Puppy Linux and boot from it. If you cant see the files that way then it really isnt looking good, in that case you will probably have to just connect the HDD to another computer and run some file recovery software.

i've been going through the harddrive and i can not tell what each file is. Since they are videos that i am trying to back up, i would rather not backup video that i don't need. Any other programs that i can try?

Well I work in a small computer repair shop and we use R-Studio to recover data. You could try it out although I'm not sure if you have to pay for it or not.