just to update.....
i've used stellar phoenix and data recovery. recovred lots of photos, pdfs, txt files.
I've also used testdisk, suppose to be one of the best one out there....seen photos, pdfs, txt files and a few .mkv. but i mainly want to recover iso or mdg files......Image files!

all of the sw i've used has a lot of folders recovered, i still haven't had the chance to go through all of those folders yet for each of the programs.

I've tried diskwarrior too but not sure how to use it to recover files. thought it was more for maintenance of disks.

will let you know.

thanx again.

katie