File Recovery

general question here, does anyone know of a good program to recover deleted files off of a hard disk? I have checked the repos and there are backup utilities which also allow for recover but you have to set up a directory prior. You know something like the file recovery program which can recover info off of compact flash cards even after they have been formatted several times? can't get it to work in wine, to tell you the truth, I am not a fan of running .exe on a linux machine, a bit of a purist I suppose.

I've never used it, but ddrescue sounds like what you're asking for.

<http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html>