Recover damaged partition help

[socreative]

One of my drive partitions shows up as Unallocated space now. It all started yesterday when on boot I got a Hard Drive error, then Windows went with chkdisk fixing issues and when the PC finally booted one of my partitions was gone.

What software should I try to recover it? Will it be safe to quick formate the unallocated space and then try to recover data?

 

[Uhtred]

testdisk or recuva

Do not format it and do not write to the drive until you have your data back

 

[bledd]

^Yup

Testdisk would be my first port of call
Then Recuva

Then 'getdatabackforNTFS' (not free)

Of course, if you had a backup, this wouldn't be an issue