Crashed Hard Disk O, Please Help

@ralvy thanks for the links, you're a lifesaver.
I'm currently working on a laptop hdd (seagate 30gb) with a corrupted partition table. however, it takes forever before it initializes. I was able to use ontrack easy recovery to get some data out of it after 8hrs (though not the exact one my clients need) when even knoppix 5.0 QTParted failed to load the corrupted hdd partition. I'v formated the partition but the bad sectors on the drive are driving me crazy as they drain all the resources i have (time, ram, cpu, even xtracool time). I do hope i can get someone who can give me xtra hints on what to do about  searching for specific files on the hdd.

P.S ralvy, one of the utilities isn't designed to locate .jpg files

Sorry, all i would have said has already been said.

I hope you succeed with the recovery process!