hard drive corrupted help!

[umbra]

my WD320 gig corrupted. I think it was the mtfs tables idk. either way I need a good program I can use to recover it and I'm a student so I'm broke. free programs are highly preffered thanks! I can still see the drive but I can't access it becuase it says its unformatted. If I use virtual lab to scan the drives it sees the info but I can't afford like the $150 they want to buy it

 

[finalgt]

How does the disk show up in Logical Disk Manager? There's a possibility it's just uninitialized, in which case you can just initialize it and assign a drive letter without losing any data - this is what happens most often to me when a drive suddenly gets borked in Windows.

 

[umbra]

no its there and it shows up fine in device manager. but when I try to access it the drive saysn it needs to be formated. but when I open it with virtuallab which is a recovery program its fine. I'm so baffled by this thing