HDD recovery via BackTrack 5

I should also add that when I look at in Windows it shows four partitions some of which are readable, but the main one (the one I need to get to) is not.

Doe anyone have any experience using Linux forensics programs? Ie. dd_rescue, autopsy, or other carving tools? I've heard those have been able to work wonders...

Or maybe this needs to go in the linux forum?

testdisk-6.14

download that and its twin program that downloads together to fix partition and restore data.

Its completely free and it helped me just a few days ago when a helpful program named "aomei partition assistant" relived me of all my data on my d: drive. If you have extra data and time and would like to lose both- I highly recommend that you use this fine Aomei's product.

~30% of data recovered by testdisk was unusable and all of it was without the proper name or folder location. Most of the important data was saved... fortunately.

I wanted to extend the C drive by taking some space from D. Windows 7 refused to do so, but Aomei promised it could. It tired, got to 5% and gave up, leaving me with broken "raw" d drive and 30% unusable files. No other program- and many have been tried would recover more than a few images.

Data recovery professionals will advise you to clone the drive as quickly as possible without dwelling on bad sectors. A freeware tool for this purpose is ddrescue. Ddrescue is a multipass cloning tool that tries for the easy sectors on the first pass, and the more difficult ones on subsequent passes. It keeps a log, allowing it to resume after an interruption.

Ubuntu Rescue Remix:
http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/

I would advise that you avoid thrashing your bad drive with data recovery software. Instead I would use such software on the clone.