having checked out allot of drive repair utilities available in mac os x recently due to two drive failures, im coming to the conclusion, that allot of them them are rarely usefull for real life situations, an example of this would be drives that dont mount whos partioning/boot/mount sectors have become corrupt, in this situation most repair software will barely work in this situation at all. What is needed is a utility that will kind of re-initialise and create a fresh mount/partition info so that the drive can be mounted and repaired from there. Also any of the of the other recovery methods become ludicrous on drives beyond about 80gb as the length of time to perform scan operation on the drive may take upto 4-5 days on a big drive, which is unless your utterly desperate for the information on the drive, an unacceptable lockup of the individual computer that most people own. ie can you afford to have your only machine locked up scanning a disk for repair purposes for 5 days ? I was getting a quote of 198 hours for a scan without any guarantee the drive would be recoverable this is pretty pointless.